Original Copy Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature

by Macfarlane, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780199296507
• ISBN10: 0199296502
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-19
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

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 which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterised 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 Lionel 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.

Author Biography

Dr Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His first book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian First Book Award.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Two theories of originality	p. 1
Victorian originalities	p. 6
'Romantic' Originality	p. 18
Introduction	p. 18
The new shibboleth	p. 27
The Romantic handover	p. 33
Purloined letters and plagiarism hunters	p. 41
Legitimizing Appropriation	p. 50
Introduction	p. 50
Composition and decomposition	p. 52
Victorian selves and plagiarism	p. 67
'They wot not of it': unconscious plagiarism	p. 77
Noble contagion	p. 82
Conclusions	p. 88
George Eliot, Originality, and Plagiarism	p. 92
Introduction	p. 92
Eliot and 'entire' originality	p. 98
Deep originality	p. 103
The onlie begetter	p. 108
The commonwealth and the general mind	p. 113
The uses of unoriginality: Eliot and misquotation	p. 120
Conclusions	p. 126
Charles Reade: The Realist as Plagiarist	p. 130
Factual fictions	p. 130
The double vision of Charles Reade	p. 136
The 'Great System'	p. 141
Conclusions	p. 154
Aesthetics of Salvage in the Fin-de-Siecle: Originality and Plagiarism in Pater, Wilde, and Johnson	p. 158
Introduction	p. 158
The cultivation of style and the breakdown of unity	p. 164
Jewel-setting	p. 168
Novitas: the turn to the dictionary	p. 172
Refinement	p. 177
Talent and tradition: the return to the library	p. 183
'Ancestral voices': the ghosts of Lionel Johnson	p. 193
Conclusions	p. 209
Bibliography	p. 212
Index	p. 237
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.