Oscar Wilde's Plagiarism
Subtitle: The Triumph of Art over Ego
Publisher: Irish Academic Press
Published: January 4, 2008
Place of publication: Dublin, Ireland
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 198
ISBN-13: 9780716529040
Subjects: Drama texts: 19th century; Novels, other prose & writers: 19th century; British Isles; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism; English
Description: "Oscar Wild's plagiarism practices across genres are seen as part of a neo-classical tradition. His allegory of plagiarism in An Ideal Husband is compared to those created by fellow playwrights, including Ibsen and G.B. Shaw. Wilde's polemical imitation of Shakespeare's cut-and-paste method in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. inspired Joyce to experiment with the erasure of quotation marks in Ulysses. The blatant collage of Wilde's poetry anticipates T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, just as it recalls Manet's paintings, which provocatively assert artistic status by drawing attention to their flatness. The mosaic-like structure of The Picture of Dorian Gray is akin to that of other anti-individualist masterpieces, notably Goethe's Faust and D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel." "The extent of sophisticated plagiarism in the canonical works and the impressive list of its apologists from Ackroyd to Zola indicate the need for new models of authorship and intellectual property, models that would benefit scholarly and artistic creativity and solve the paradox of plagiarism as simultaneously one of the most serious and most common of literary crimes."--Jacket.