Epilogue

Abstract

Plagiarism is a research topic likely to incite the prospector’s worst anxiety, that of suspecting you are toiling away in barren ground while the tracts of land on either side promise much richer pickings. Plagiarism studies abuts nowadays on the larger field of ‘crimes of writing’, including literary transgressions such as forgery, impersonation and general hoaxing, while being hemmed in on its other flank by copyright studies, which investigates the way that creativity has been circumscribed by the legal construction of authorial property. My policy has been to acknowledge the boundary pressure exerted by these adjacent territories, but at the same time to insist that these patches of ground fall outside the pale of my immediate interests. I have resisted, in particular, the line of argument that sees the plagiarism allegation in history as a premonition of, or a sort of conceptual outrider for, the advancing idea of copyright. My book has understood the charge of plagiarism as tapping into concerns that belong in the first instance to both morality and aesthetics, and it has not viewed such scruples as merely a cover for underlying considerations of an economic nature.