Introduction

Abstract

Ours, it appears, is destined — for better or for worse — to be an age of parody. Or is it? In the past few decades, prominent critics such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Gérard Genette, Fredric Jameson, Julia Kristeva, Michael Riffaterre, and Edward Said (to name only a few) who are otherwise irreconcilable in their wider interpretive strategies could all be counted on, at the very least, to have agreed that the creation of any truly original work of art was not only a theoretical but also a practical impossibility. As recently as 1979, Malcolm Bowie, investigating Jacques Lacan’s indebtedness to Freud, had yet felt it necessary to preface his account by reminding readers that a ‘lingering Romantic conception of genius leads us to expect of an original thinker that his ideas will spring in fully formed splendour from within himself, or from nature, or from nowhere’.³ As Bowie justly observed at the time, most of his readers would only naturally have assumed that ‘where lesser minds may find proper employment in reading and elaborating texts from the past, the true innovator is expected to do everything for himself’.⁴

Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?

— Edward Young (1759)¹

In a sense, we write nothing original and everything we compose is a re-ordering of events, scenes and ideas that other storytellers put together long before we were born. If someone composed an entirely new story, perhaps we wouldn’t recognise it as a story at all.

— Phillip Pullman (2005)²