Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel
Imitation, Parody, Aftertext

Views the Victorian novel through the prism of literary imitations that it inspired.

Adam Abraham (Author)

9781108717243, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 July 2021

299 pages, 6 b/w illus.
22.6 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.443 kg

'… the book makes for pleasurable reading. Abraham's prose is clear, witty, jargon-free, and the work he has done on these aftertexts, including his concise summaries, will provide future scholars with rich new material for years to come.' Lisa Rodensky, Victorian Studies

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]