Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment (review)

Reviewed by: Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment Robert L. Mack (bio) Reginald McGinnis , ed. Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2009. xvi+234pp. US$110. ISBN 978-0-415-96288-9. The brief preface to Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment informs the reader that the volume owes its inception to a session held at a meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Montreal, Canada. The editor of the collection, Reginald McGinnis, stresses that although the session provided the incentive for this more ambitious "comparative study of law and literature," the papers originally delivered at that conference have been "either extensively or entirely rewritten" (ix). McGinnis also emphasizes the extent to which the intellectual scope of the project was expanded to include a number of additional contributions and subjects. The two key concepts that inform all the essays in this ambitious and interdisciplinary collection—originality and plagiarism—remain "twin topics" which, as one of the contributors (John Vignaux Smyth) archly puts it, seem still in our own era to be "almost as fashionable as they were in the Enlightenment" (175). From such a seemingly straightforward binary follows a host of questions that can be raised relating to topics including artistic invention, intellectual property and copyright, authorial identity and authority, notions of literary paternity, imitation, and parody. All these subjects—and more—are [End Page 579] productively confronted; the range of authors, artists, and works addressed in these essays remains genuinely impressive. Although a review of this length can only touch on some of the more intriguing characteristics of the individual contributions, I feel compelled from the outset to underscore the extent to which there seems very often to be—in almost all of these essays—substantially more going on than perhaps first meets the eye. The essay by Robert W. McHenry that opens the collection, for example, seems to offer a genial if somewhat familiar recapitulation of John Dryden's thoughts on "imitation and appropriation as legitimate elements of original composition" (1). McHenry recalls that the "sense of literary forbears seems always to have been important to Dryden," and he emphasizes that Dryden himself "often invoked [the] traditional image of Shakespeare as a literary father" (3). The essay highlights the playwright's own awareness of the "generational conflict" that resonated throughout the period in which he was writing. McHenry's discussions of specific dramatic works similarly rehearse familiar accounts that detail the extent to which Dryden's dramatic material repeatedly called attention to the difficulties raised by even the most well-intentioned attempts at adaptation or revision. McHenry describes All for Love (1678) as "filial both in its piety towards Shakespeare's achievement and in its competitive determination to approach the challenge in a wholly different manner" (12); a near-contemporaneous version of Sophocles' Oedipus, on the other hand, is described as far more aggressive in its demonstration of a "filial approach to imitation at its closest to rebelliousness" (13). McHenry seems often to be reiterating the conventional view of Dryden as a playwright who regarded "those earlier writers as both fathers, whose patrimony consisted of precisely those literary elements that should benefit those now writing," while challenging them as "rivals whose legacies must be addressed" (19). McHenry's account of Dryden's protean responses to matters of innovation, invention, and plagiarism seems, in other words, to offer its reader a helpful recapitulation of the major controversies in which the playwright was routinely involved. Yet the glaring absence throughout the contribution of any extended consideration of Harold Bloom's now famous (or infamous) analysis of the supposed crises of anxiety that the writers of Dryden's generation were the first to confront surely constitutes a calculated omission on the part of the essay author. Such a pointed omission, however, subsequently allows itself to be construed as effecting a peculiarly salubrious shift of critical attention away from what might simply have been yet another recapitulation of the "family romance"—the Oedipal agon—that constituted Bloom's own reading of the rivalries and neuroses that (allegedly) "burdened" [End Page...

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