Robert Macfarlane

'"Originality" is only plagiarizing from a great many', remarked Rupert Brooke, stealing the line from Voltaire. Questions of originality, and accusations of plagiarism, are as old as literature, but different literary cultures have interpreted the relationship between originality and plagiarism in startlingly dissimilar ways. Original Copy investigates and documents the drastic reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterised the 1820s and 1830s, through to the stickle-brick creativity of Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson at the century's end. It reveals how ideas of originality and plagiarism were not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided many important Victorian writers - Eliot, Dickens, Reade, Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson among them - with a creative resource. Moving between numerous different fields of thought and knowledge - literary criticism, the history of science, manuscript culture, anthropology - and written in a supple and elegant style, this book shows that the ideas of originality and plagiarism were the subjects of nineteenth-century literature, as well as what it was subject to.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Is a River Alive? and Underland, a soaring blend of cultural history, meditation, and memoir about the mysteries of the world's highest places and our unending quest for the summit "Wonderfully illuminating." --Los Angeles Times - "Fascinating." --The New York Times Book Review For those who love mountains, their wonder is beyond dispute. But for many, their allure is beyond reason; their extraordinary beauty offset by the immense risks involved in climbing them. In this groundbreaking and now classic work, Robert Macfarlane answers the enduring 'why' of mountaineering. He explores how mountains have come to grip the Western imagination and hold so many of us spellbound, drawing us up into the high places--sometimes at the cost of our lives. Braiding history, geology, human stories, and glittering accounts of his own journeys in high, wild landscapes from the Rockies to the Himalayas, Macfarlane unfurls the mysteries and passions of mountaineering's imaginative evolution. His account begins in the mid-1700s, when a fascination for mountains was sparked by the work of both poets and scientists in Europe. It ends with a vivid re-creation of George Mallory's three, ill-fated expeditions in the 1920s, as Mallory sought to be the first to summit Mt. Everest.