Abstrak

Kembali

The essay examines the way in which negative attitudes to novelistic imitation and literary appropriation developed in eighteenth-century reviews of popular fiction. By showing the tendency of critics relentlessly to highlight the predictability, repetitiveness and literary borrowings of minor novels, the essay argues that reviewing itself became formulaic and imitative, involving a predictable reviewers’ jargon and a significant amount of ‘borrowing’ between periodicals. Importantly, the critical discourse against appropriation in popular literature can also be found in modern criticism– a replication which illuminates how impulses towards the creation of literary hierarchies go hand-in-hand with negative attitudes towards appropriation throughout the history of literature.