Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic PeriodUniversity 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? |
From inside the book
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... came to realize that these writers were in agreement about something that I could not claim to understand: they knew what constituted plagiarism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the term applied, and x Preface.
... claims on the present. . . . This makes historical analysis the work of self-consciously taking on the burden of completing or resisting what we show we inherit. (229-32) This book is an effort at just such an historical relation. In ...
... claim of this study is that the relationship was constitutive. The stakes in Romantic-period charges of plagiarism were aesthetic, and the contemporary debates regarding the legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular literary obligations ...
... claims as ridiculous, asserting that plagiarism has always been and remains a transgression against the property of another writer that merits moral condemnation. Christopher Ricks, one of the most venerable of these traditionalists ...
... claimed imaginative origins for his works but who borrowed covertly from the texts of other writers.12 The plagiarisms have generated sustained critical interest, I suspect, because Coleridge seems to represent the failure of ...
Contents
1 | |
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 |