Hermes: God of Thieves. Plagiarism in Twentieth Century Literature

The question of imitation moves from an open and obvious phase, the phase of Classicism, during which the models from antiquity were imitated with pride and with a conscious desire to set fixed and codified models for compositions, following norms for distinction in well-defined genres, to the period of Romanticism, during which the concept of the work's uniqueness predominated, and the work was seen as the link between God and the world. During the twentieth century the attitude towards plagiarism changed again: in our century the question of artistic originality becomes anxiety-provoking and the relationship with tradition becomes competitive. The heavy weight of tradition creates in the writer a desire to exorcise in some way the fear of the death of creative originality and gives rise to the playful, demystifying re-presentation of previous works, in an attempt to desecrate genres and precursors, re-creating them overtly and covertly at the same time. Thus plagiarism transforms itself into a new creative force, in which tradition is no longer imitated in a subservient, nor a reverential fashion, nor in the sense of the subdivision of pre-established genres. Plagiarism becomes instead a challenge on the same grounds of the canonical authors, demonstrating in this manner a strong capacity to capture the essence of the author's own language (a link to the new emphasis on the act of reading). This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.