Imitating Authors

Abstract

Imitating Authors analyses the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans. At its centre lie the imitating authors of the English Renaissance, including Ben Jonson and the most imitated imitator of them all, John Milton. Imitating Authors argues that imitation is not simply a matter of borrowing words, or of alluding to an earlier author. Imitators learn practices from earlier writers. They imitate the structures and forms of earlier writing in ways that enable them to create a new style which itself could be imitated. That makes imitation an engine of literary change. Imitating Authors also shows how the metaphors used by theorists to explain this complex practice fed into works which were themselves imitations, how those metaphors changed, and how they have come to influence present-day anxieties about imitation human beings and artificial forms of intelligence. It explores relationships between imitation and authorial style, its fraught connections with plagiarism, and how emerging ideas of genius and intellectual property changed how imitation was practised. Imitating Authors includes detailed discussion of authors who imitated (notably Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro) and of the theory of imitating authors in Plato, Cicero, Quintilian, Longinus, Castiglione, the Ciceronian controversies of the sixteenth century, in legal and philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment, and in recent discussions about computer-generated poems.

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