Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007 - 236 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.

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Contents

Coleridge Plagiarism and Narrative Mastery
17
Property and the Margins of Literary Print Culture
49
Byron Originality and Aesthetic
86
Travel Writing and
122
Class Improvement
144
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

Tilar J. Mazzeo is a New York Times bestselling author of books that include The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It, The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate Story of the World's Most Famous Perfume, and The Hotel On The Place Vendôme: Life, Death, And Betrayal At The Hôtel Ritz In Paris. She also writes extensively on wine for the media and is the author of The Back Lane Wineries of Napa, The Back Lane Wineries of Sonoma, and the forthcoming guide to The Back Lane Wineries of the Pacific Northwest. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and today writes narrative nonfiction and memoir on the history of war, women, and luxury. She teaches English as the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College and teaches narrative nonfiction at writer's workshops in the Canadian Gulf Islands of British Columbia.

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