Original copy : plagiarism and originality in nineteenth-century literature / Robert Macfarlane.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Macfarlane, Robert, 1976-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plagiarism--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Plagiarism.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

History.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

xii, 244 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

'"Originality" is only plagiarizing from a great many', remarked Rupert Brooke, stealing the line from Voltaire. Questions of originality, and accusations of plagiarism, are as old as literature, but different literary cultures have interpreted the relationship between originality and plagiarism in startlingly dissimilar ways. Original Copy investigates and documents the drastic reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterized the 1820s and 1830s, through to the stickle-brick creativity of Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson at the century's end. It reveals how ideas of originality and plagiarism were not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided many important Victorian writers-Eliot, Dickens, Reade, Pater, Wilde, and Johnson among them-with a creative resource. Moving between numerous different fields of thought and knowledge-literary criticism, the history of science, manuscript culture, anthropology-and written in a supple and elegant style, this book shows that the ideas of originality and plagiarism were the subjects of nineteenth-century literature, as well as what it was subject to.

Contents:

Two theories of originality 1

Victorian originalities 6

1 'Romantic' Originality 18

The new shibboleth 27

The Romantic handover 33

Purloined letters and plagiarism hunters 41

2 Legitimizing Appropriation 50

Composition and decomposition 52

Victorian selves and plagiarism 67

'They wot not of it': unconscious plagiarism 77

Noble contagion 82

3 George Eliot, Originality, and Plagiarism 92

Eliot and 'entire' originality 98

Deep originality 103

The onlie begetter 108

The commonwealth and the general mind 113

The uses of unoriginality: Eliot and misquotation 120

4 Charles Reade: The Realist as Plagiarist 130

Factual fictions 130

The double vision of Charles Reade 136

The 'Great System' 141

5 Aesthetics of Salvage in the Fin-de-Siecle: Originality and Plagiarism in Pater, Wilde, and Johnson 158

The cultivation of style and the breakdown of unity 164

Jewel-setting 168

Novitas: the turn to the dictionary 172

Refinement 177

Talent and tradition: the return to the library 183

'Ancestral voices': the ghosts of Lionel Johnson 193.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [212]-235) and index.

ISBN:

0199296502

9780199296507

OCLC:

74966550