Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel

Imitation, Parody, Aftertext

Adam Abraham

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108493079
• eBook ISBN: 9781108656191
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How can we tell plagiarism from an allusion? How does imitation differ from parody? Where is the line between copyright infringement and homage? Questions of intellectual property have been vexed long before our own age of online piracy. In Victorian Britain, enterprising authors tested the limits of literary ownership by generating plagiaristic publications based on leading writers of the day. Adam Abraham illuminates these issues by examining imitations of three novelists: Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot. Readers of Oliver Twist may be surprised to learn about Oliver Twiss, a penny serial that usurped Dickens's characters. Such imitative publications capture the essence of their sources; the caricature, although crude, is necessarily clear. By reading works that emulate three nineteenth-century writers, this innovative study enlarges our sense of what literary knowledge looks like: to know a particular author means to know the sometimes bad imitations that the author inspired.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Chapter One The Pickwick Phenomenon
• Chapter Two Charles Dickens and the Pseudo-Dickens Industry
• Chapter Three Parody; or, The Art of Writing Edward Bulwer Lytton
• Chapter Four Thackeray versus Bulwer versus Bulwer: Parody and Appropriation
• Chapter Five Being George Eliot: Imitation, Imposture, and Identity
• Postscript, Posthumous Papers, Aftertexts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index