Description:
Were the Romantic poets plagiarists, and did plagiarism have the same meaning two hundred years ago as it has today? Tilar J. Mazzeo 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.
Review Quotes: "Mazzeo's new book is . . . smart and insightful, and points out that eighteenth-century writers took a certain amount of borrowing for granted. What mattered was whether you were sneaky about it and, even more important, whether you improved upon what you took, by weaving it seamlessly into your own text and adding some new context or insight."-- "New York Times"