Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)
Cambridge University Press, 8/22/2019
EAN 9781108493079, ISBN10: 1108493076
Hardcover, 298 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
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.
Prologue
1. The Pickwick phenomenon
2. Charles Dickens and the pseudo-Dickens industry
3. Parody
or, the art of writing Edward Bulwer Lytton
4. Thackeray versus Bulwer versus Bulwer
parody and appropriation
5. Being George Eliot
imitation, imposture, and identity
Postscript
Posthumous papers
Aftertexts.