Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period

Tilar J. Mazzeo

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812239676, 9780812239676
• eBook ISBN: 9780812202731
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

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.

Index

Adams, Percy, 109

Addison, Joseph, 82

Altieri, Charles, xii

anonymous publication, 83, 109–11

Augustan literature, 12, 14. See also neoclassical aesthetics

authorship: assumptions regarding solitary genius, ix, xi, xiii, 6–7, 16, 30, 182, 186–88; commercial or professional, ix, xii, 54–62, 66, 75, 81, 85, 95–96, 123–24, 144, 166–75; poststructuralist theories of, xi, xiii, 1, 6–7, 147, 186–88; pre-Romantic constructions of, xiii, 1. See also gender

ballads, 49, 54, 70–85. See also Wordsworth, William

Barrell, John, 157

Barthes, Roland, 6, 47–48, 196–97 n.27

Bayley, Peter, 15–6, 103, 119, 147–49, 152, 207–8 n.10

Beach, Joseph Warren, 46

Beattie, James, 178

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, 151

Beckford, William, 108, 111, 116

Bennett, Andrew, 85, 153

Bently, Lionel, 11

Birns, Nicholas, 137

Blackstone, William, 51–53

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, countess of, 116, 119–21

Bloom, Harold (The Anxiety of Influence), 136

Bloomfield, Robert, 179

Bonjour, Adrien, 46, 56

Boruchoff, David, 182, 187

Bostetter, Edward, 30, 195 n.12

Bradley, A. C, 3, 190 n.2

Brewer, William, 180

Brown, Capability, 145

Brownlow, Timothy, 145–46

Brun, (Sophie Christiane) Friederike, 18–19, 45–46, 50, 55–57, 62

Burgher, Gottfried August, 75, 82

Burke, Edmund, 15

Burke, Séan, xiii

Burns, Robert, 176

Byron, George Gordon, lord: accused of plagiarism, x, xii, 2, 8, 41, 44, 73, 86, 106, 144–45, 147; concern with textual unity, 128, 130; conflict with William Wordsworth, 44, 86–87, 94–96, 106–7, 119, 144, 147; debts in Childe Harold, 94–107, 111, 144; debts to Coleridge, 91–94, 96–97, 100–101, 110, 116; debts to Continental literature, 104–7, 116–21, 202–3 n.15, 204 n.30; debts in Deformed Transformed, 119; debts in Don J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Romantic Plagiarism and the Critical Inheritance
• Coleridge, Plagiarism, and Narrative Mastery
• Property and the Margins of Literary Print Culture
• ”The Slip-Shod Muse’: Byron, Originality, and Aesthetic Plagiarism
• Monstrosities Strung into an Epic: Travel Writing and the Defense of “Modern” Poetry
• Poaching on the Literary Estate: Class, Improvement, and Enclosure
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments