Literary Piracy Research Articles

A survey regarding awareness of ‘plagiarism while writing articles’ among students and faculty members of Indian colleges/universities

Objectives: Originality concerning scientific and research publications is of vital importance in this day and age and must be protected. With literary piracy reaching celestial heights in recent times, ethics must be maintained so that research integrity prevails. Plagiarism ranges from copying a few words to entire paragraphs and even ideas. The contribution(s) of the original author are not mentioned, not even using in-text citations. Plagiarism occurs largely due to the writer’s ignorance, but may be deliberate on occasion. The aim of the study was to understand the level of awareness among students and faculty members of Indian colleges/universities about plagiarism and its related aspects while writing and publishing articles. Materials and Methods: A virtual cross-sectional survey was conducted on students and faculty members using Google Forms. A 20-item self-administered questionnaire was framed by the authors after an extensive review of the literature and circulated through various WhatsApp groups to extract information from the participants about causes of plagiarism, paraphrasing, money-oriented publication agencies, plagiarism checker software and preventive measures. Results: Of 63 total respondents, 93.7% of participants were just aware of the term plagiarism in relation to writing papers and research articles, although 54% admitted that they had never written an article. Conclusion: The overall analysis highlighted that around 93% of responders had preliminary knowledge about plagiarism, but were still unaware of the seriousness of the problem and its grave consequences. Extensive campaigning and workshops need to be conducted to guide writers about the rules of publication ethics to prevent such malpractice.

Vampirism as Literary Piracy in Paul Féval’s Vampire City (1875)

Paul Féval’s final vampire novel, Vampire City (1875), features Ann Radcliffe as an intrepid adventure heroine who leaves her fiancé on the morning of their wedding in order to rescue her friends from vampires on the continent. On one level, Vampire City forms a parody of the classic gothic novel. Critics have focused on the humorous elements of the text, highlighting it as pure ‘pastiche’ and distinguishing it from Féval’s first two vampire novels which involved ‘forays into more sensitive and dangerous areas’ (Gibson, 2013, p. 108). Closer attention to the story and the frame narrative that encloses it, however, suggests that Vampire City offers more than just pastiche or parody. This essay argues that in Vampire City Féval advances a critique of the cross-Channel literary marketplace in the Victorian period by using vampirism as an allegory for literary piracy. While condemning literary theft (in all its various forms) though, Féval uses an irreverent alternative history of Ann Radcliffe and a spirited manipulation of the tropes of gothic fiction to secure a place for ‘unoriginal’ creativity with integrity.

LITERARY PIRACY AND TEXT RECYCLING AS LEGAL PHENOMENA

The author of the article has analyzed the current legislation of Ukraine and legal literature on determining the concepts of “literary piracy”, “text recycling”. It has been proved that literary piracy as a legal phenomenon is a type of intellectual property infringement to objects that are protected as objects of intellectual property rights. It has been argued that literary piracy should not be considered as an abuse of the right to creativity by a person who commits literary piracy. Literary piracy is a generic term for academic literary piracy as a type of violation of academic honesty. It has been established that academic literary piracy and text recycling according to the current legislation of Ukraine are forms of fraudulent pretence as a type of academic honesty violation. The author has argued that if one establishes the fact of literary piracy as intellectual property infringement, the offender is subject to sanctions provided by the legislation on protection of intellectual property rights, such as compensation of damage (material damage), including lost profits, or recovery of proceeds received by an offender as a result of copyright infringement and (or) related rights. When the fact of academic literary piracy is established we apply sanctions, which are provided by the legislation on education and science, for example, cancellation of the decision of a one-time specialized scientific council on awarding a person with the PhD degree and issuing an appropriate diploma. It has been proved that text recycling is legal fiction in its essence, i.e. such a non-existent position, which is declared existing and becomes mandatory due to its enshrinement in the legal prescription. It has been substantiated that the legislation on the procedure of considering the issue of establishing academic literary piracy needs to be improved. It is also advisable to define different types of academic literary piracy at the legislative level. The author has offered to consider text recycling not as a legal category, but as a moral and ethical category in the context of ethical approaches to self-citing, academic honesty, etc.

Problems of Legal Regulation of Academic Integrity Compliance in Ukraine

The current state of legal regulation of academic integrity in Ukraine has been analyzed. It has been found out that the standards of academic integrity are still poorly studied in the scientific field in Ukraine. However, some aspects of the legal regulation of academic integrity have already been considered in the works of national scholars. However, given the relative novelty of the term of “academic charity” in the current legislation, a number of issues of legal regulation of academic integrity in Ukraine remain relevant and unresolved.
 It has been noted that the regulatory requirements for the standards of academic integrity were first enshrined only in 2017in the Art. 42 of the Law of Ukraine “On Education”. It became the legal basis for the protection of the author’s scientific work from its appropriation or unjustified publication by another person. Until now, the “standards” of academic integrity were not enshrined in law, although they were used to some extent in verifying the results of dissertation research. This aspect is still problematic from the point of view of legal regulation, and hence practical application.
 The following problems of the current state of legal regulation of academic integrity in Ukraine have been identified: diversity in the approaches of educational institutions to the criteria used in testing scientific papers for literary piracy; the existence of a legal conflict regarding the regulation of the issue of “self-plagiarism” between the provisions of the Law of Ukraine “On Education” and the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 567 dated from July 24, 2013; the need to distinguish between additional and detailed liability for the violation of academic integrity; inconsistency of terminology in the current legislation, etc. Ways to solve existing problems have been suggested.

Dracula or Draculitz?: Translational Forgery and Bram Stoker’s “Lost Version” of Dracula

Dracula or Draculitz?: Translational Forgery and Bram Stoker’s “Lost Version” of Dracula Katy Brundan (bio), Melanie Jones (bio), and Benjamin Mier-Cruz (bio) The body of vampire literature—much like the body of the vampire himor herself—is subject to a certain degree of fraudulence and imposture. At the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Jonathan Harker reveals that “in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting” (326), a revelation that suggests the vampire’s representation is dominated first by mechanical reproduction and second by inauthenticity. Dracula’s participation in an “inauthentic” archive drives this article, as we argue that the technologies of monstrosity we associate with the literary vampire—those relating to bodily and technological reproduction—have long been intimately bound to the textual practices of fraud and literary piracy. The specific forms of textual fraud we examine here reach their apotheosis in the fraudulent translations of Dracula published in Sweden and Iceland very shortly after the appearance of Stoker’s novel. Until very recently, critics and biographers assumed that the 1901 Icelandic translation of Dracula was connected to Stoker’s archive through documents now lost to time.1 Since 1986, when Richard Dalby first translated into English the signed preface to Valdimar Ásmundsson’s Makt myrkranna, the Icelandic version has been seen as evidence of Stoker’s collaboration or blessing of the text’s significant changes. In 2017, researcher Hans Corneel de Roos published a translation of Makt myrkranna as Powers of Darkness, hailing the text as Stoker’s “lost” work. De Roos speculated that the translator may have been “working from a proto-version of Dracula that Stoker never worked out to the end” or from a draft “based on the notes Stoker made from March 1890 on” (Introduction 23–24). Meanwhile, Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew, and a notable researcher, insisted that Stoker must have “orchestrated” the “significant” Icelandic changes (10). Such confidence was short-lived, for researchers soon uncovered not only a source for the Icelandic version, but evidence of literary fraud. In fact, the Icelandic version is an abridged translation of the earlier Swedish Mörkrets makter (Powers of Darkness), a version of Dracula translated by A-e, which appeared in 1899, a discovery made by Rickard Berghon. Although both Nordic translations claim on their title pages to be “a novel by Bram [End Page 293] Stoker” and include a preface by “B.S.,” their connection to Stoker is tenuous at best. Just a year after publishing his Powers of Darkness, de Roos discovered that passages from the preface had been lifted from the memoirs of a Swedish priest. Rather than being “authorized” versions of Dracula, both translations bear the hallmarks of “artful piracy” (de Roos, “Was the Preface” 25). But these fraudulent translations of Dracula are not the anomalies they appear at first glance. Far from being aberrations—glitches in the otherwise smooth surface of Dracula’s textual transmission—these translations, we argue, epitomize the nineteenth century’s urge to produce and disseminate vampire fiction through various forms of fraudulent textual practices. The Swedish version, with its forged preface, has been examined by very few researchers but forms a particular focus of the latter half of this article as we consider how nineteenth-century vampire literature—with its fraudulently creative translations—invites us to reread the relationship between translation, authorship, authenticity, and the archive. As research has recast the Nordic texts as translational forgeries, this article takes a closer look at textual fraud in relation to vampire literature, a genre closely tied to evolving notions of textual (in)authenticity. If in Dracula, “[h]orror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies but because he appropriates and transforms them” (Arata 630), the same transformational and appropriating forces appear at the level of textual construction and transmission. We argue that, upon closer examination, Dracula’s extended archival strata, as well as its diegetic surface, reveal a “monstrous” allegiance to literary piracy, forgery, and misused translations. Turning first to Stoker’s novel, we note that many important critical studies have traced Dracula’s preoccupation with textual...

Literary Piracy and the Art of Experimental Narratives

Literary Piracy and the Art of Experimental Narratives

Literary Piracy and the Art of Experimental Narratives

Literary Piracy and the Art of Experimental Narratives

Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Monica F. Cohen

Reviewed by: Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Monica F. Cohen Carrie Sickmann Han COHEN, MONICA F. Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. 312 pp. $45.00 cloth and eBook. When a colleague suggested that I read Monica F. Cohen's Pirating Fictions to inform my work on unauthorized continuations, I wasn't expecting a book on literal parrot-toting, wooden-legged pirates. In it, Cohen links maritime piracy to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices of unauthorized reprinting and adaptation in ways that sometimes strained my credulity but nonetheless impressed me with her ingenuity, entertaining delivery, breadth of knowledge, and unexpectedly captivating interpolations. Pirating Fictions argues that in nineteenth-century pirate fiction "the pirate becomes a vehicle of profound tension between an emergent ideal of intellectual property and a literary culture whose emphatically collective, derivative, citational character tends to confound claims of individual originality and ownership" (2-3). In other words, it argues that nineteenth-century authors employ the figure of the pirate to work through their ambivalent responses to literary piracy: many objected to the reprints and plagiarisms siphoning profits from their own works while simultaneously celebrating collective ownership and authorship in the abstract. Cohen narrates her own surprise at discovering this ambivalence in the introduction to the book, where she writes, I expected nineteenth-century pirate fiction to craft allegories that defended personal artistic ownership against literary dishonesty of all sorts….What I found, however, was that many of the same writers who suffered from literary piracy of their fiction also fictionalized maritime pirates…in ways that celebrate them as…figures whose affective energies make a case against a Romantic originality that emphasized individual intellectual ownership. (2) Cohen devotes the book to making meaning of this disconnect, to explaining why and how authors use maritime piracy as a metaphor for their conflicting views of literary piracy. At first I questioned this impulse, wondering if the disconnect didn't simply indicate a lack of correlation. After all, sometimes isn't a pirate just a pirate? But Cohen assembles evidence from multiple archives and disciplines that cast pirates as "charismatic storytellers and dramatic entertainers," thus positioning them as figures laden with metatextual significance. While pirates are the central conceit of the book, to my mind they aren't central to its primary payoff, which I understand to be tracing canonical nineteenth-century [End Page 445] authors' conflicted responses to evolving conceptions of authorship and grounding those responses in the interdependence of print and theater. Cohen organizes the book according to "three waves of copyright discussion" (13): the first centers on the personalized model of authorship outlined in the Copyright Act of 1814, the second on the challenges of regulating dramatic performances of published novels as reflected in debates about the 1833 Dramatic Literary Property Act, and the last on the free-trade ideology and role of international copyright regulation discussed in the 1878 Report of the Royal Commission on Copyright. Using an impressive interdisciplinary approach, she weaves theater history, print culture, literary criticism, and maritime history into each chapter. Chapter One establishes Defoe's ambivalent view of commerce as an attractive alternative to property; Chapter Two highlights Byron's use of melodramatic conventions to cultivate his authorial celebrity; Chapter Three outlines Scott's emphasis on depersonalized and collective authorship; Chapter Four reveals Cooper's international fame to be a product of the unregulated stage; Chapter Five juxtaposes Dickens's notorious battles over American reprinting with his devotion to the same theater that appropriated his works; Chapter Six exposes Gilbert and Sullivan's anti-property themes in the very play, The Pirates of Penzance, designed to facilitate their protest of American literary piracy; Chapter Seven suggests that Stevenson's playful representation of literary looting as cliché disguises the anti-property energies of free trade in discussions about copyright; and Chapter Eight depicts Barrie's resistance to proprietary authorship as an aesthetic statement about creativity. Cohen uses the "staginess" of the nineteenth-century pirate to elucidate some of the complex connections between copyright history and theater history (8). In doing so, she contributes an important voice to...

A Crime of Being Self-Interested: Literary Piracy in Early Communist China, 1949-1953

A Crime of Being Self-Interested: Literary Piracy in Early Communist China, 1949-1953

Mark Twain on potholes and politics: letters to the editor

Whether he was taking us along for journey down the Mississippi with couple of runaways or delivering speeches on the importance of careful lying, Mark Twain had an innate ability to captivate readers and listeners alike with his trademark humor and sarcasm. Twain never lacked for material, either, as his strong opinions regarding most issues gave him countless opportunities to articulate his thoughts in the voice that only he could provide. A frequent outlet for Twain's wit was in letters to the editors of various newspapers and periodicals. Sharing his thoughts and opinions on topical issues ranging from national affairs to local social events, with swipes along the way at woman suffrage, potholes, literary piracy and other scams, slow mail delivery, police corruption, capital punishment, and the removal of Huck Finn from libraries, Twain never hesitated to speak his mind. And now thanks to Gary Scharnhorst, more than hundred of these letters are available in one place for us to enjoy. From his opinions on the execution of an intellectually brilliant murderer, to his scathing review of bureau he perceived as a pack of idiots running on currency of doughnuts, Twain's pure, unbridled voice is evident throughout his letters. Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics gives readers chance to delve further than ever before into the musings of the most recognizable voice in American literature.

Role of executive machinery in Combating literary and musical piracy

Economy of the twenty first century is based on knowledge. Studies around the globe have concluded that the emerging copyright laws relating to industries associated with informative and entertainment value is having tremendous impact on the growth and national economies. It is being realised that the future prosperity of nations will depend more upon their intellectual property than their natural resources and physical assets. Understanding of the copyright law, therefore assumes significance. Copyright law tries to provide a balance between the interests of creators of work and those who want to have an access to the said works. The players in the copyright are the creators, disseminators of work and the public who make use of the work for their benefit-personal or private. The specific works covered by the law of copyright are original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works and derivatives like film and sound recordings.

IMITATION FICTION: PIRATE CITINGS IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'STREASURE ISLAND

When Charles Dickens triedto lobby for American support of an international copyright agreement during his wildly popular 1842 tour of the United States, the English author was famously shocked to find himself lambasted as an elitist who dared expect payment for what Americans believed they had the right to read for free (McGill 109–40; Claybaugh 71; Pettitt 152). Dickens encountered in the practice of literary piracy, or what was called in the United States, the culture of reprinting, a deep fissure in capitalist democratic culture between individual ownership and public access, an ideological divide that forms the backdrop for the creation and circulation of nineteenth-century print. If the legal privatization of intellectual property hovered in the imagination of so many Victorian writers, it formed the happy ending of a long nineteenth-century struggle over literary piracy, a contention of goods that shaped the Victorian stage as we well as the transatlantic literary marketplace.

Richardson and Copyright

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1741) was one of the earliest of the moralizing epistolary novels that became commercially popular with the new reading middle class. It was also subject to widespread literary piracy, published in unauthorized editions, serialized in newspapers and literary magazines, and beset by sequels, satires, and parodies. As such, it became a benchmark for how the new novel form would be treated under law and equity after passage of the Statute of Anne, England’s first copyright law. Tracing Richardson’s efforts to enjoin copyright infringement of Pamela is however not an easy task, as court records are elusive, but publication history and patterns of newspaper advertising allow his one recorded claim in Chancery court to be reconstructed, revealing many of the nuances of early copyright doctrine as it evolved in the mid-18th century.

The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins ed. by Jenny Bourne Taylor (review)

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 178 The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins Edited by Jenny BourneTaylor; pp. xix+207. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006. $85.00 cloth; $29.99 paper. During the last decade of the twentieth century, studies ofWilkie Collins began to flourish, following a century or more of neglect. In 1995, Wilkie Collins to the Forefront,Some Reassessments, edited by Nelson Smith and R. C.Terry, was published. It consists of fifteen essays originally presented at theWilkie Collins Centennial Conference, held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, from 29 September to 1 October 1989.The year 1998 witnessed the publication ofAndrew Gasson’s Wilkie Collins:An Illustrated Guide.A year later saw the first publication of Collins’s earliest novel, Ioláni;Or,Tahiti as ItWas, written nearly 150 years earlier, in an edition edited and introduced by Ira B. Nadel (curiously, this text receives scant attention in The Cambridge Companion). In 2003, the University ofTennessee Press published Reality’s Dark Light:The SensationalWilkie Collins, edited by Maria K. Buchman and Don Richard Cox, which has fourteen contributors on various aspects of Collins’s oeuvre and aims to deliberately expand Collins’s afterlife beyond The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In the meantime, primary materials continue to emerge.These include a six-volume edition ofWilkie Collins’s letters (1999 and 2005) and a reconstruction of his library (2002).There are two outstanding biographies: Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors (revised edition 1993) and William M. Clarke (the husband of Collins’s great-granddaughter), The Secret Life ofWilkie Collins (revised edition 1996). So the introduction and thirteen essays in Jenny BourneTaylor’s volume rework some familiar territory; however, there are very welcome contributions to neglected areas. John Bowen writes well on “Collins’s shorter fiction,” observing appositely that“Wilkie Collins was adept at exploiting the narrative possibilities that the growth of magazine and periodical publishing in the nineteenth century created” (37). Moreover, Bowen’s contribution is the most pertinent for students of Victorian periodicals, although he misses some analytical opportunities, perhaps understandably, as his subject is Collins’s shorter fiction. However, Collins’s non-fiction prose, mainly written for HouseholdWords and All theYear Round, receives short shrift in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Jim Davies’s “Collins and the Theatre” is a succinct account of Collins’s fascination with the theatre and his attempts to earn a good deal of money by writing a London hit. Rachel Malik’s“The Afterlife ofWilkie Collins” encompasses a good deal in a short space, including a brief discussion of television and other adaptations. Interestingly, for Malik,“Collins proved a rich resource for early films” (183), an observation unfortunately insufficiently developed. Lyn Pykett, author of the recently published, very good Wilkie Collins (2005) in the Oxford“Authors in Context” series, while writing succinctly, retreads familiar territory in her“Collins and the Sensation Novel.” Similarly, Ronald R.Thomas in “The Moonstone, Detective Fiction and Forensic Science” contributes little 179 Reviews that we did not already know, and Lillian Nayder’s essay“Collins and Empire,” which is largely confined to The Moonstone, does not add anything to what has previously been said about this text. Graham Law’s “The Professional Writer and the Literary Marketplace” draws upon useful findings from his Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000).At least Law does refer to Collins’s and James Payn’s neglected joint assault on literary piracy in A National Wrong (1869); a deeper analysis of this work would have added considerably to his contribution . Carolyn Dever’s“The Marriage Plot and Its Alternatives” draws attention to rich complexities in Armadale (1866). John Kucich’s “Collins andVictorian Masculinity” includes an arresting opening sentence—“Wilkie Collins’s novels abound in melancholic male protagonists” (125)—and a reasonably detailed discussion of The Woman in White (1860). Kate Flint’s“Disability and Difference” acknowledges that“Wilkie Collins’s fiction repeatedly foregrounds a number of individuals who are challenged in their relationship to the material world” (153). Flint’s discussion of the neglected Hide and Seek (1854) and The Law and the Lady (1875) is replete with insights.Tim Dolin writes interestingly on“Collins’s career...

Copyright and literary piracy in Ghana

AbstractThis paper discusses the issue of copyright, especially as it pertains in Ghana. It also examines the extent of literary piracy and its impact on authors and the book industry in Ghana. Remedies proposed to curb this activity include resourcing of the Copyright Office; creation of copyright awareness; and strict prosecution of offenders.

Literary Piracy, Nationalism, and Women Readers in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1850-1855

During the early nineteenth century, most books sold in the United States were foreign imports or copies. At an 1834 book trade sale, for example, of the 114 fiction books printed in America, 95 were English reprints.1 A reliance on British literature was facilitated by the lack of an international copyright law and what Laurel Brake has called "a vestigial, high cultural value attached to the ejected imperial power."2 However, America's nascent publishing industry was also shaped by what Meredith McGill calls a "Jacksonian resistance to centralized development" that kept the nation's book production system dispersed.3 This decentralization compounded and reinforced the young nation's lack of a strong literary identity and led to its reliance on imports from Great Britain for literary sustenance. British novels easily filled the bill for this decentralized system of publishers who struggled to survive by printing what was well-known and had a ready audience of consumers. American magazines were no exception: they took the culture of reprinting even further by adapting a wide variety of British publications for their own purposes. Despite a growing sense of literary nationalism, McGill contends that reprinting was the cultural norm for most of the century and was even considered to be proof of an enlightened democracy because it produced affordable reading materials for the general public and avoided monopolistic publishing practices. In fact, opponents of an international copyright agreement defined the manufacturing and dissemination of texts as America's primary cultural role, not the creation of original literature.4 Harper's New Monthly Magazine is the quintessential example of a literary endeavor that sought to adapt British literature to the establishment of a healthy and egalitarian publishing empire in the United States.5 While Harper's mimicked the survival techniques used by [End Page 63] many American publishing houses in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its preoccupation with creating a national literary identity out of "pirated" scraps of British periodicals signals a transition from national dependence on British culture to a more patriotic devotion to elevating the status of American literature during the 1850s.6 In this essay, I examine how Harper's repackaged and redeployed British literature for a nationalistic purpose, thereby participating in the nation's transformation from a culture of reprinting to a culture of authorial originality and nationality.7 Through what seems an unlikely appeal for a publication famous for its literary piracy, Harper's editors forged a patriotic message addressed primarily to women readers. While the magazine valued British novelists such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray over American writers, its focus on British authors was rhetorically constructed as nationalistic. The editors theorized that by providing the public with these examples of "excellent" high cultural texts, the magazine would raise the standards of American readers and, in turn, raise the quality of American literature. In this way, Harper's urged its women readers to nurture the next generation of native readers with the British literary models it provided so that they would eventually have the skills to both recognize and create a distinctly tasteful American literary culture. In order to understand how Harper's was able to build a patriotic message despite its reputation for piracy, it is necessary to determine how it became the most successful magazine in America between 1850 and 1855.8 Published at the beginning of the American industrial age, Harper's was produced at one of the country's first steam-powered presses located at Harper and Brothers headquarters in New York. The magazine rose to prominence due, in part, to its effective use of technology to create some of the earliest electroplate images in the nation. The magazine's editorial staff also brought status to the endeavor. From 1850 to 1856...

American literature and the culture of reprinting, 1834-1853

The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American of reprinting and held it in place for two crucial decades. In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.

David ben Aryen Leib of Lida and his Migdal David : Accusations of Plagiarism in Eighteenth Century Amsterdam

David ben Aryeh Leib of Lida (c. 1650-1696) was chief rabbi of several communities, among them the Ashkenaz community of Amsterdam, and the author of highly regarded books. His career was clouded, however, by charges of slander, Sabbatianism, and plagiarism. Although exonerated of the first two charges, the cloud of literary piracy has cast a continuing shadow over Lida's reputation. Two of Lida's works, Migdal David and Divrei David , are attributed to other writers. The article addresses the validity of those charges, finds that Lida himself alluded to the fact that he was not the author, and suggests that he expressed regret, albeit in an enigmatic manner, in a later work.

The Paratext of Everything: Constructing and Marketing H. G. Wells's The Outline of History

No one could have been more astonished than he was at the great popular success of the Outline. He went to bed, so to speak, educational reformer and he woke up best seller. --H. G. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind So H. G. Wells recounts the extraordinary success of The Outline of History (1920) in the introduction to one of its companion volumes, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932). Recalling the transformation of his career from a popular, if controversial, novelist and social thinker before the Outline to a bestselling educationist immediately after its publication, he argues that the book's success "was as great a discovery for his publishers as for himself--that there existed an immense reading public in the world which was profoundly dissatisfied with the history it had learnt at school, and which was eager for just what the Outline promised to be, a readable, explicit summary of the human adventure." 1 Arguing that the book was "not planned or written for a popular sale," but rather "conceived as a school book," he explains that its success was due not to "any extraordinary merit in the writing" itself--which he later considered to be "humdrum"--but to the pertinence of the subject matter and the discovery of a "vast new public" eager for self-education and a unifying vision of the world. 2 Published during the incipience of the League of Nations and "written primarily to show that history as one whole is amenable to a more broad and comprehensive handling than is the history of special nations and periods," the Outline succeeded primarily because he made his version [End Page 237] of world history "sufficiently clear and accessible for the time and attention" ordinary readers could afford to give it. 3 It was written in plain, often colloquial language that repeatedly reminded readers of their common ancestry (dating back to primitive human beings) and the need for an improved future for humankind. Its postwar readership was, he argues, an "immense multitude of alert and hungry minds, ready for and seeking a wider and more serviceable vision of the past . . . [an] adolescent and adult stratum of ordinary intelligent people." 4 The transformation in his career was not accidental. Nor did it happen overnight, as he maintains in the opening quotation. Rather, despite his reiterated claim in Experiment in Autobiography (1934) that "it did not occur to me that this Note-Book or Outline of History would be a particularly saleable production," the success of the Outline and its companion volume, The Science of Life (1930), was due in great part to attentive marketing, distribution, and paratextual presentation, much of it organized, if not controlled, by Wells himself. 5 Indeed, throughout his career, the author was seldom single-handed in the construction of his reputation or the presentation and reception of his books, even though he continually tried to take advantage of new opportunities (such as the rise of literary agencies, net books, and book clubs) to make his name and ideas known to the public. Wells's supervision of the Outline and The Science of Life demonstrates that he once again had a definite idea of the public he wanted to reach with his nonfiction and, as in his direction of Macmillan's adver- tising methods for Kipps (1905), specific ideas of how to appeal to it. 6 Throughout, he insisted on "as much dignity as possible in the publication of these big works," yet simultaneously tried to reach the largest possible public and achieve the greatest profit for himself and his collaborators. 7 While numerous critics and biographers have remarked on the success of these textbooks--A. B. McKillop, alone, has focused on the issue of authorial collaboration and literary piracy in the Outline--no one has yet looked closely at how Wells attempted to control the publication, distribution, and reception of...

Formes de déception : le dernier volume des Cantos d’Ezra Pound

Some recent scholarship on the final volume of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Historical research and textual criticism on the final volume of Ezra Pound’s Cantos - the so-called Drafts & Fragments section - have in recent years made great strides in improving our understanding of its curious evolution and highly problematic status. The result is a fascinating and at times maddeningly complex story of multiple authorship involving not only Pound but also his editors and readers. The end of The Cantos, which was first published as an official response to an act of literary piracy, is an example of what Pound specialist Peter Stoicheff has termed, in an apt prhase, «interwoven authority ». The aim of this paper is to review some of the recent scholarship on the Drafts & Fragments volume and, on that basis, to give a summary account of its history and conditions of textual production, and finally to suggest what is at stake in the many changes the text has undergone over the years.