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  • Wilde & Plagiarism
  • Bruce Bashford
Florina Tufescu. Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism: The Triumph of Art Over Ego. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008. viii + 198 pp. $55.00

This book begins with the dramatic claim that its aim “is to settle the last remaining dispute in the field of Wilde studies,” namely the dispute over whether Wilde was a plagiarist (1). The charge of plagiarism has been made against Wilde from the reception of his early Poems to the current work of his editors Ian Small and Josephine Guy. So this is certainly an issue in Wilde studies, but as Tufescu concedes, most work in the field ignores it, so why is it the central issue? For her it is because a frank examination of Wilde’s use of his sources lands us in a dilemma: either we admit that he was in fact a plagiarist or we have to revise our concepts of “plagiarism, originality and creativity” (3). The book does the latter, which means it isn’t a narrow defense of Wilde against the charge but instead a comprehensive reinterpretation of what Wilde was about as a writer.

Tufescu presents this reinterpretation by recovering what she calls the classical tradition and placing Wilde in it, both as theorist and practitioner. This tradition needs recovery because of the triumph of Romanticism’s account of the creative process. According to this account, a writer creates an original work, that is, something virtually unprecedented. It’s this view of creativity that’s responsible for our negative view of plagiarism: since the writer originates the work, it belongs to the writer; therefore it can be stolen by the plagiarist. Romanticism actually gave the concept of plagiarism greater cultural significance because it needed that concept as its Other: since Romantic “originality itself was elusive and indefinable, plagiarism acquired far greater importance as the supremely undesirable illuminating of the ultimately unattainable” (11). The opposing classical tradition, as Tufescu sketches it, is roughly what we have come to call an intertextual theory: literature is made from other literature. Every author borrows of necessity; the ethical charge of theft is a theoretical error; the only proper judgment is aesthetic: does the author make effective use of what he or she borrows? This is an antiexpression theory in that the individual identity of the author is swallowed up by the larger institution of literature that the author perpetuates—hence Tufescu’s subtitle. While this is the older tradition—Tufescu cites Seneca and Martial as proponents—modern classical authors have to address two audiences if they are to be commercially successful, a popular one corrupted by Romanticism and a smaller one in the know. For the latter, these [End Page 349] authors may foreground their “plagiarisms” as an ironic, playful sign of their participation in the tradition.

Before turning to the book’s treatment of Wilde, I should note that it contains considerably more than one might expect in a single-author study. There’s an informative survey of recent inquiries into what constitutes plagiarism—a topic in itself that can’t be ignored given the growing incidence of high-tech plagiarism in the undergraduate classroom. Tufescu’s effort to acquaint her readers with the classical tradition brings into the book analyses of several writers in addition to Wilde. She devotes a chapter, for instance, to Poe, Baudelaire and Pater as exemplars of the tradition who influenced Wilde. In other chapters, she traces the tradition as it continued after Wilde, discussing Ibsen, Shaw, Joyce, and the novelists David Leavitt and D. M. Thomas, among others. Tufescu isn’t merely recovering this tradition as an interpretive context, as one might reconstruct an outdated worldview; rather, for her it captures the truth about literary production. Her last chapter, “Let Us Plagiarize Wildly,” proposes revising English studies in the light of this tradition. Thus the book could be read as a polemical essay in the history and theory of criticism, with attention to the teaching of literature. Tufescu’s wide range of learning and ability to bring this learning deftly to bear on the topic at hand make the book a consistently engaging read.

There are certainly things to be said for Tufescu...

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