This introduction offers a brief account of Clare’s biography, drawing attention to some of the major events in his life, and some of the aspects of his life and his work which have most interested critics. It goes on to offer an extended close reading of one of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the ways in which Clare is able to write within convention, but also to develop a unique poetic voice. By examining his engagement with the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque as exemplary, it argues for his particular capacity both to reflect and to enable reflection upon Romantic-period issues and debates, and also for the originality of Clare’s posture and verse.

This chapter describes how copyright evolved from a right in books, to a right in ’original works’. The chapter considers whether ’works’ are things (the ’metaphysical question’).

Oxford classicist, lover of Renaissance art, Pater might seem to belong in a different atmospheric universe from that which presided over the emergence of intertextual theory in the Paris of the 1960s. While his name is virtually synonymous with subjective aesthetic response, the notion of intertextuality, first named and honed at the hands of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, is, by contrast, tightly intertwined with the idea of authorial impersonality. Yet these realms and modes of thought are not as dichotomous as they may initially appear, however starkly distinct their critical languages. Over the decades since his death, Pater’s work has given rise to considerable comment regarding his use of source material. This chapter examines Pater’s practice of ‘second-hand’ writing in ‘Style’ – in particular his borrowings from Flaubert and Maupassant – in the light of intertextual theory in comparison with the extreme citational practices of Flaubert and Joyce. Highlighting significant similarities and differences between their treatment of sources, it brings into focus the specificity of Pater’s drive to style the second-hand.

The introduction defines the two key terms of the book, “matter” and “making.” For the early English court poets, “matter” was a relative term. In its most concrete sense, it denoted the pre-existing textual sources that a poet used as the basis for his poetry, but it also referred, in a broader and Aristotelian sense, to whatever materials a poem was understood to be made from. “Making referred to the set of techniques that early writers used to rework matter into poetry, and it had its origins in classical rhetoric: a poet was said to begin by “inventing” (or identifying) matter on which to work, and only afterwards to “dispose” (or restructure) that matter into a new form and shape. “Making” differs from the Scholastic model of authorship, which stresses the authority (or auctoritas) of the writer, and it also differs from early modern theories of authorship, which stress the autonomy of the literary work. It persists as the prevailing method for writing poetry even to the reign of Elizabeth I, although literary attitudes towards matter in particular begin to shift during the sixteenth century.

Chapter 4 explores Kant’s theory of genius. The chapter avoids the well-discussed question about whether or why Kant denied that scientific activity requires or displays genius. It instead asks whether, in Kant’s view, genius can produce original nonsense. Is taste a component of genius, or does taste impose constraints on genius as if from the outside? The chapter maintains that Kant takes up two distinct conceptions of genius, the thin and the thick. Both conceptions can be found in Kant’s early thoughts about genius. When the two notions are retained in the third Critique, it creates internal tensions.

Neuroscientific studies of the creative process reveal that artistic ingenuity is not the black box the law supposes it to be. These studies explode several popular myths about art and artists—myths that courts have used to justify their failure to truly interrogate creativity. The courts tend to believe in the creativity of novices, romanticizing the artistic potential of children and the mentally ill. Instead, the science reveals a strong correlation between expertise, learned skills, and creative output. Western societies assume that creativity arrives in a flash of insight, often when the artist is not even thinking about the project at hand; the truth is that creative breakthroughs take sustained effort and motivation. Rather than being incapable of outside understanding, various aspects of creative thought—including the generation of new visual imagery—can now be identified via changes in brain chemistry. The chapter uses copyright cases concerning a variety of works—from fine art to photography to Barbie dolls—to illustrate the flawed ways in which courts try to discern artistic creativity and how they might be reconceptualized in light of neuroscientific discoveries.

This essay examines the importance of unoriginality in nineteenth-century American literature, showing how imitation and conventionality affirmed writers’ respectability and provided important legitimizing credentials. By way of illustration, this essay considers the career of Washington Irving, who presented himself as a guardian of literary tradition and repeatedly narrated the virtues of allowing the past to shape the future. As Irving’s career evidences, nineteenth-century readers did not particularly prize originality but instead found value in the familiar and conventional.

Creativity, an apex of consciousness, contains the altered states of a creative trance that are treasured across cultures and time. Ranging from the creativity of everyday life to the reveries that inspire works of science and art to the fast-moving action of sports that shape and reshape personal goals, the creative trance can also be a transcendent experience, an ecstasy using the body’s own pharmacology. There are multiple depths of a creative trance, from light enjoyable flow states to deep experiences obliterating all external stimuli. The degree of depth can correlate with the psychological capacity for absorption. The creative trance relates to the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Openness, Big-C and little-c creativity, Wallas’ four-stage creative process, and Barron’s concept of a habitually creative person. The creative trance can be a pivot to personal transformation, creating new work and a new view of the world, and may also bring the capacity for transcendence.

This extended analysis of The Penelopiad, an alternative “herstory” to Homer’s Odyssey, and Hag-Seed, a radical rewriting of The Tempest staged in a Canadian men’s prison, deals with Atwood’s revisionary practices as she redeploys classic texts for her own purposes. Referencing Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, this discussion foregrounds these texts as Atwood’s most sustained adaptation projects, exploring how such revisions involve authorial decisions around purpose, fidelity, commentary, appropriation, and autonomy. Discussion of The Penelopiad centers on Atwood’s reflections on the nature of myth in its contemporary interpretations and on her feminist politics of narrative representation, while Hag-Seed offers a different revisionary perspective with its emphasis on the figure of the author-artist-magician, personified in the theatre director, Prospero’s double. Crossing genre boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow, Atwood exploits the appeal of popular genres while retaining the resonance of literary fiction.

Chapter 5 contends that crypsis acted as a versatile trope by which fin-de-siècle literary and cultural critics thought through and complicated ideals of self-expression and originality. The critics discussed often invoked animal crypsis as a figure of conformity and bad faith, the opposite of authentic, autonomous expression. Such cryptophobic individualism is traced through the work of Lesley Stephen, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and its contradictions examined. Although the trope drew on the imagery of adaptive appearance, its ideal of authentic expression was incongruent with the latter’s semiotic logic. Further, several of the authors discussed worried that too much discursive individualism and authenticity would threaten social cohesion. Stephen’s and Watts-Dunton’s religious and literary criticism attacked cultural imitation and protective mimicry while fearing that their removal might presage violent revolution or degeneration. Walter Pater, conversely, concluded that all art was inherently mimetic, reworking elements from pre-existing sources. He suggested that individualism was attained by mixing eclectic influences, generating novel combinations. It would take Pater’s pupil, Oscar Wilde, though, to fully realise the radical implications of such mimetic individualism. His vision of artistic authenticity required eluding recognition so that, paradoxically, the artist truly stood out by blending in.

Starting from the demonstration by Milman Parry and Albert Lord that a complex traditional system developed over centuries for the composition in performance of epic song by deeply experienced poets is the engine of Homeric poetry, this essay describes the way that meaning is generated and can be identified within such a system. In all of the elements of the poem, from the smallest compositional unit (the line and its components) to the largest (the overall song consisting of many scroll-length songs each of which consists of concatenated themes), the experienced interpreter must grasp both its horizontal and vertical aspects ‒ in other words, an element’s place within the hierarchy of the whole as well as what differentiates any given element from its likes elsewhere in the tradition.

Street art in Australia is not only an important part of urban Australian culture but also a serious commercial business and a part of government urban planning in metropolitan areas. It is both legally recognised and encouraged by sophisticated government policies but those policies have surprisingly little to say directly about copyright. Graffiti is usually defined as unlawful because it is done on public or private property without permission and there is no general legal freedom to paint on public or private property surfaces without express or implied permission. It is discouraged by not enjoying legal protection and being the subject of considerable adverse commentary.

Issues in copyright law such as the appropriate term of protection, the ability of copyright regimes to embrace (or at least adjust to) new modes of production and new concepts of authorship, and the proper allocation of benefits to authors and the public have generated intense and highly visible debates on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It may therefore be helpful to take a different perspective and examine a less strident issue like originality to see how it is applied to newer uses like digital media, photographs, news footage, and TV formats. Such was the inspiration for this chapter: to examine the foundational concept of originality in the copyright schemes of Lithuania, the EU, and the United States in order to make some observations about the similarities and differences in statutes and case law in each jurisdiction. The hope is to provide some guideposts for how the respective courts understand the concept of originality and look at how such concepts have been applied in practice when determining whether or not a work is deserving of copyright protection in the first instance. What follows does not claim to be an exhaustive treatment of the subject of comparative concepts of originality. Rather, it is the authors’ attempt to select illustrative and engaging cases (and doctrines) to extract the principles – sometimes clearly articulated, at times less so – that inform views in these respective legal systems, and that may also be common across borders. As practitioners, we also have the modest ambition of providing an analytical frame of reference that may prove useful to fellow lawyers who find themselves tackling questions of whether new types of works or new uses of works are in fact original enough to merit copyright protection.