This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.

This book offers a wealth of thinking about the complex and often contradictory definitions surrounding the concepts of plagiarism and intellectual property. The authors show that plagiarism is not nearly as simple and clear-cut a phenomenon as we may think. Contributors offer many definitions and facets of plagiarism and intellectual property, demonstrating that if defining a supposedly "simple" concept is difficult, then applying multiple definitions is even harder, creating practical problems in many realms. This volume exposes the range and breadth of these overlapping and complex issues, reflecting a postmodern sensibility of fragmentation, and clarifies some of the confusion, not by reducing plagiarism to ever simpler definitions and providing new or better rules to apply, but by complicating the issue, examining what plagiarism and intellectual property are (and are not) in our more or less postmodern world. This book offers and explains various definitions of plagiarism. Issues covered include copyright law and plagiarism; imitation and originality in classical rhetoric; sociohistorical perspectives; and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century notions of authorship in student publications and textbooks. The authors also offer different applications of these plagiarism definitions in specific arenas including university writing centers, administrative settings, peer-writing groups, textbook publishing, and the wider marketplace.

Contributors offer many definitions and facets of plagiarism and intellectual property, demonstrating that if defining a supposedly "simple" concept is difficult, then applying multiple definitions is even harder, creating practical problems in many realms.

This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.

Postmodern Plagiarisms investigates literary plagiarism and how it serves as a strategic act in several postmodern US-American texts. The book discusses the strong link between author and text at the interface between economics, law, and literary theory, and the complex process of its subversive violation. As a consequence, literary plagiarism is seen as a cultural litmus test for the dynamic notions of authorship, originality, and creativity.

In this illuminating study, Marilyn Randall takes on the question of why some cases of literary repetition become great art, while others are relegated to the ignominy of plagiarism. Her discussion reveals that plagiarism is not the objective textual fact it is often taken for, but a phenomenon governed by the norms and conventions of literary reception. Randall turns her focus on the critical debates surrounding cases of perceived plagiarism. Charting the progress of plagiarism in the history of Western letters, her study ranges over centuries, from the notion's first apperance in Roman times to contemporary disputes about intellectual property. Randall considers the development of copyright law and the notion of authorship, presents a wide range of texts, and draws aptly on Foucault's notion of the discursive construction of authorship. Just as Foucault studied insanity to find out what was meant by sanity, says Randall, so the study of plagiarism can reveal what was meant by the term "literary" at various cultural moments. She shows that perceived instances of plagiarism are aspects of an ongoing power struggle in the literary field. And as she reveals, it is not the plagiarist but the accuser who is most concerned with achieving profit and power.

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.