provocative and fruitful, offering new insights

Meg Jensen MLR

[a] fast-moving, broad-sweeping book

Matthew Reynolds, Times Literary Supplement

[Macfarlane proposes] fresh insights...Crisp, elegant, and impeccably researched, Original Copy promises to challenge reader's assumptions about the true nature of creativity, even those who think they've read it all before.

Kelly Grovier, The Observer

Se alle

an excellent book. It is smart, well researched and, unquestionably, will prove to be an important contribution to the study of literary originality and the history of plagiarism...and impressive and important book.

Review of English Studies, Volume 58, Number 237

'"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.
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A wide-ranging and elegantly written study of how nineteenth-century culture thought about, and thought with, the idea of originality. It reveals how plagiarism was not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided a creative resource for many important writers including Eliot, Dickens, Pater, and Wilde.
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1. Introduction ; 2. 'Romantic' originality ; 3. Legitimising appropriation ; 4. George Eliot, originality, and plagiarism ; 5. Charles Reade: the realist as plagiarist ; 6. Aesthetics of salvage in the fin-de-siecle: originality and plagiarism in Pater, Wilde, and Johnson
Les mer
provocative and fruitful, offering new insights
First history of the ideas of plagiarism and originality in the nineteenth century Examines both canonical authors (Wilde, Eliot, Dickens) and lesser-known figures (Charles Reade, Lionel Johnson) Wide-ranging, succinct, and engagingly written
Les mer
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.
Les mer
First history of the ideas of plagiarism and originality in the nineteenth century Examines both canonical authors (Wilde, Eliot, Dickens) and lesser-known figures (Charles Reade, Lionel Johnson) Wide-ranging, succinct, and engagingly written
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780199296507
Publisert
2007
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Vekt
464 gr
Høyde
220 mm
Bredde
140 mm
Dybde
20 mm
Aldersnivå
UU, UP, P, 05, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
258

Forfatter

Biographical note

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.