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Article: IMITATION AND PLAGIARISM: THE LAUDER AFFAIR AND ITS CRITICAL AFTERMATH.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in the Literary Imagination
- Article date:
- March 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Georgia State University, Department of English. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Christopher Ricks, in a recent British Academy Lecture, very forcefully reminds us that plagiarism has been morally condemned for many centuries, warning also against contemporary "exculpators" who claim it to be only a recent invention arising from the politics of property (150-55). Ricks might be slightly cheered to know that, in the mid-eighteenth century, a strongly moral view of literary theft was alive and well despite all the tangled complexities of copyright laws and shifting attitudes toward literary property that we associate with that period.
As early as 1737, in fact, one writer made an impassioned plea against confusing the legal rights of authorship ...