Imitating Authors is a major study of the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from antiquity to the present day. It extends from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans, and illuminates both the theory and practice of imitation. 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 was not simply a matter of borrowing words, or of alluding to an earlier author. Imitators learnt practices from earlier writers. They imitated the
structures and forms of earlier writing in ways that enabled them to create a new style which itself could be imitated. That made 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, and how those metaphors 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. In refreshing and jargon-free prose Burrow
explains not just what imitation was in the past, but how it influences the present, and what it could be in the future. Imitating Authors includes detailed discussion of Plato, Roman rhetorical theory, Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Imitating Authors is a major study of the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from antiquity to the present day. It extends from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans, and illuminates both the theory and practice of imitation. 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 was not simply a matter of borrowing words, or of alluding to an earlier author. Imitators learnt practices from earlier writers. They imitated the
structures and forms of earlier writing in ways that enabled them to create a new style which itself could be imitated. That made 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, and how those metaphors 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. In refreshing and jargon-free prose Burrow
explains not just what imitation was in the past, but how it influences the present, and what it could be in the future. Imitating Authors includes detailed discussion of Plato, Roman rhetorical theory, Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Preface
Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts
Introduction
Part 1: Antiquity
1: From Mimēsis to Imitatio: Before and After Plato
Building Bodies: Imitatio and the Roman Rhetorical Tradition
Dreamitation: Lucretius, Homer, Virgil
Part 2: Early Modernity
4: Petrarchan Transformations
5: Adaptive Imitation: Ciceronians, Courtiers and Quixotes
6: Formal Imitation: The 'Leaden-Headed Germans' and Their English
Heirs
7: Ben Jonson: Formal Imitation
Part 3: Milton and After
8: Milton: Modelling the Ancients
9: Imitation in the Age of Literary Property: Pope to
Wordsworth
10: The Promethean Moment: Mary Shelley and Milton's Monstrous
Progeny
Posthuman Postscript: Poems more Durable than Brass
Bibliography
Colin Burrow was a Fellow and Tutor and Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge, before he took up a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls
College, Oxford, in 2006. He has written extensively about
classical and early modern British and European literature, and has
edited the complete poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and
(forthcoming) John Marston. He is an editor of Review of English
Studies, and (with Jonathan Bate) General Editor of the Oxford
English
Literary History for which he is writing the Elizabethan volume. He
is a regular reviewer for The London Review of Books.
Any scholar interested in literary imitation would profit from
reading Imitating Authors, while those interested in Renaissance
literary culture will find it particularly valuable. I know of no
better introduction to the long, intricate history of imitatio.
*William Ramsay, Ben Jonson Journal*
Burrow's home turf is early modern English literature, but he is an
early modernist of exceptional range, extending across to the
Continent, back to classical antiquity, and forward to contemporary
poetry and fiction. He is also uncommonly good at explaining
recondite matters in plain English.
*Tobias Gregory, London Review of Books*
one of the finest authors of the English language in this
century...this is a book of intoxicating depth that will leave many
intelligent readers astonished at their own ignorance in
comparison...I highly recommend a full engagement with Burrow's
text.
*Dr Clifford Cunningham, University of Southern Queensland, Sun
News Tucson*
There is a genuine challenge to our presumptions about creation and
authorship.
*Geoffrey Heptonstall, P.N. REVIEW *
Imitating Authors offers lessons for creative writers as well as
critics, signalling a world of literary predecessors, practices and
forms waiting for a knowingly imitative literary culture to inherit
it once again.
*Charles Green, University of Chichester*
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