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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... Elements of Romantic Plagiarism The basic parameters of plagiarism in the Romantic period were remark— ably stable, although there were interpretive disagreements regarding the precise applications of the standards. The charge and its ...
... elements, culpable plagiarism could not be said to have occurred. In contrast, a writer could be persuasively charged with poetical plagiarism if borrowings were simply unacknowledged and unimproved. Plagiarisms of this sort were not ...
... elements were necessary to defend an author from allegations of illegitimate borrowing. By the same token, in the absence of improvement, no other elements were necessary to indict an au— thor on charges of poetical plagiarism either ...
... elements. This critical emphasis was supported in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century law, which recognized style as an element of literary property. Improvement represents one of the clear ways in which Romantic—period assessments ...
... elements and the emphasis on improvement in particular suggests how deeply invested late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers were in textual strategies of assimilation, absorption, and appropriation. While Romanticism has ...
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 |