Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 M04 23 - 256 pages

In a series of articles published in Tait's Magazine in 1834, Thomas DeQuincey catalogued four potential instances of plagiarism in the work of his friend and literary competitor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. DeQuincey's charges and the controversy they ignited have shaped readers' responses to the work of such writers as Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and John Clare ever since. But what did plagiarism mean some two hundred years ago in Britain? What was at stake when early nineteenth-century authors levied such charges against each other? How would matters change if we were to evaluate these writers by the standards of their own national moment? And what does our moral investment in plagiarism tell us about ourselves and about our relationship to the Romantic myth of authorship?

In Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period, Tilar Mazzeo historicizes the discussion of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century plagiarism and demonstrates that it had little in common with our current understanding of the term. The book offers a major reassessment of the role of borrowing, textual appropriation, and narrative mastery in British Romantic literature and provides a new picture of the period and its central aesthetic contests. Above all, Mazzeo challenges the almost exclusive modern association of Romanticism with originality and takes a fresh look at some of the most familiar writings of the period and the controversies surrounding them.

From inside the book

Contents

1 Romantic Plagiarism and the Critical Inheritance
1
2 Coleridge Plagiarism and Narrative Mastery
17
3 Property and the Margins of Literary Print Culture
49
Byron Originality and Aesthetic Plagiarism
86
Travel Writing and the Defense of Modern Poetry
122
Class Improvement and Enclosure
144
Afterword
182
Notes
189
Bibliography
211
Index
227
Acknowledgments
235
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Tilar J. Mazzeo teaches English at Colby College.

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