“Literary Plagiarism and Scientific Originality in the ‘Trans-Atlantic Wilderness’ of Goldsmith, Aikin, and Barbauld.”

摘要

Some of the most innovative recent work on the history of science has accounted for the distinctively literary turn of scientific rhetoric across the eighteenth century. In this vein, Melissa Bailes argues that poets Oliver Goldsmith and Anna (Aikin) Barbauld, along with Barbauld’s doctor-writer brother, John Aikin, find a mutually constitutive relationship between natural history and poetry that maps onto broader sociopolitical issues. Bailes situates these authors’ works – particularly Goldsmith’s celebrated “Deserted Village” (1770) and Barbauld’s critically panned poetic response to this work, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) – within the pre- and post-Revolutionary periods. For Bailes, the competing critical reception of these two poets reflects shifting ideas about British nationalism and intellectual property. While Goldsmith was praised for his imaginative recycling of Buffon and other naturalist writers for poetic ends, Barbauld’s similar use of Goldsmith and naturalist writers was condemned as plagiarism. Bailes brilliantly connects such anxieties to a post-revolutionary moment in which critics sought “to fracture America’s associations with originality” (277).