If the Minerva Press is the publisher most strongly associated with fictional excess, then the gothic is surely excess’s most representative genre. Readers decried the great length of these novels, their numerousness, their unoriginality, and the over-the-top emotions they depicted. This chapter tracks the phenomenon of ‘imitation’ in the late eighteenth-century heyday of the gothic, first in its role as a convenient denunciation hurled at new gothic novels, and then as a broad and flexible authorial practice that, the chapter argues, allowed gothic novelists to capitalize on their strength in numbers and their dedicated readerships. Minerva Gothic novelists, including Regina Maria Roche and Eliza Parsons, used imitation to define and expand the norms of their genre, and publishers like William Lane used the recognizability of certain genres to creatively advertise their new books, while even highly successful authors like Ann Radcliffe had to grapple with charges of unoriginality.

This chapter considers the place of Ishiguro’s work within the novel tradition. It traces Ishiguro’s dialogue with the novel form, as this extends from Artist of the Floating World to Klara and the Sun, in order to examine the means by which he adapts the tradition to his own ends. The chapter begins and concludes with a reading of Klara and the Sun that focuses on the role of imitation. How far can Klara, the ‘artificial friend’, be regarded as a copy of an existing form of life, and how far does she manifest a new mode of being? And how does Ishiguro adapt the apparatuses of the novel in order to explore the difference, between the imitation of an existing life and the creation, in prose, of an unprecedented one, a fictional life without a model in the world?

The eighteenth century is the richest period of georgic writing in English literary history. No era before or since exhibits a like range of experimentation with the georgic form, from translations and formal imitations of the Virgilian original to prose essays, pamphlets, treatises, periodicals and technical manuals. Though various in form and purpose, these texts declare their georgic affiliation by the tropes and themes they employ and by the structure of feeling they evoke. This chapter explores four of these distinguishing features: persistent authorial reflection on the style appropriate to georgic writing (elaborate or plain, poetic or technical?), the labour of the farmer and that of the writer, variety and miscellaneity in the georgic and traditional farming practices versus experimentation. These characteristic concerns are taken up by writers with a wide range of thematic preoccupations: agriculture, labour, sport, human health, mining, manufacturing, empire, nationhood, political economy and slavery.

This essay explores the role that GC II 10 plays in the context of the treatise as a whole. It argues that while the rest of the treatise, up to and including GC II 9, explains generation and perishing by means of material and formal causes, GC II 10 provides the efficient and final causes, and thus brings the project announced at the outset of GC to completion. The essay analyses the arguments for the efficient cause of generation and corruption (identified with the sun’s annual course along the ecliptic) and its final cause (identified with a universal desire for the highest kind of being). For Aristotle, the best approximation to the being of imperishable substance which the sublunary sphere permits, given the nature of its constituents, is perpetual reproduction (for living things) and an endless cycle of reciprocal change (for elements). Finally, the essay illustrates how Aristotle’s fourfold scheme of causal explanations practically applies to generation and perishing in view of what Aristotle claims elsewhere about the unmoved mover and the gradation of being.

By considering several of Johnson’s critical essays on poetry, this chapter compares his criticism of poetry with his own practice. In his lives of Milton and Gray, Johnson emphatically rejects poetics that employ language, images, and situations distinct from ordinary experience and normal speech. Milton and Gray are found wanting in this regard, with “Lycidas” ridiculed for its pastoral fiction and Gray indicted for thinking that poetry should be written in language remote from common speech. In treating London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson’s two imitations of Juvenal’s Roman satires, Richetti explores their differences from the Roman originals and shows how Johnson’s poems share many qualities with his occasional verse, written for friends to mark personal events, sometimes satirically, more often affectionately. The Vanity offers readers Johnson’s verse at its most powerful, unsparing in its renditions of the human condition, giving common language a vivid and almost terrifying concrete particularity.

This chapter considers how Samuel Johnson’s various disabilities shaped perceptions of him during his lifetime and continue to influence critical and biographical assessments of his personality, conversational prowess, and literary style. Given that modern conceptions of disability formed in the nineteenth century, I discuss why interpretations of Johnson’s mental and physical impairments might be better served by focusing on terms that were current in the eighteenth century, such as melancholy and peculiarity. Johnson’s friends and associates frequently commented on the “peculiarity” of his bodily movements. I examine episodes in which these peculiarities inspired people to stare at Johnson or to imitate him. These episodes reveal the deeper significance that eighteenth-century men and women ascribed to unusual and surprising forms of embodiment. I conclude by exploring the intriguing connections critics have made between Johnson’s “peculiar” body and his distinctive prose style.

The introduction lays out the major aims of the book.

Chapter 2 investigates how identity in Senecan tragedy is achieved via sympathetic identification with others, whether individuals or groups. The chapters focuses on Roman practices of exemplarity, which encouraged the formation of individual selves via the appropriation of others’ - often normative - characteristics. This habit of coyping and becoming a copy of other people connects the human individual to the fictional character, which is by nature inherently replicable. The two plays discussed in this chapter are Troades, where Astyanax is constantly characterised as a ‘second Hector’, and Hercules, where the protagonist pursues self-aemulatio in place of family attachments.

The literary culture of early modern England was bilingual; literature of all kinds, including poetry which is the focus of this book, was read and written in both English and Latin throughout the whole of the period that we call Renaissance or early modern. Both the overlap and the lack of overlap between Latin and English poetry make a difference to our understanding of this literary culture. It matters that so many apparently innovative moves in English poetics – including the fashion for epyllia, epigrams and Cowley’s ‘irregular’ Pindaric odes – can be traced back to continental Latin poetry: that is, to ‘neo-’ Latin rather than primarily classical verse; it is also important that there are some forms – such as sonnets in English and (until Marvell’s First Anniversary) short panegyric epic in Latin – that were a characteristic feature of verse in one language but not the other. This introduction outlines the educational and literary context in which this poetic bilingualism emerged and developed, with a particular emphasis upon the cultural centrality of 'paraphrase' broadly understood.

What is the significance of Christians’ new identity in 1 Peter 2:11-5:11? This chapter argues that this identity is foundational for the exhortation that follows. The exhortation in 2:11-5:11 is deeply informed by the structures and conventions of Jewish and Greco-Roman exemplarity discourse. Greek, Roman, and Jewish discourse exhibited a strong preference for domestic role models. As a new γένος, ἔθνος, and λαός, Christians needed new Christian exemplars, which 1 Peter supplies. At the family level, the best exemplars for young Roman elite were their own illustrious ancestors. Similarly, Christians, as one family in the house of God, now have a host of their own illustrious ancestors from the scriptures and Christian tradition to aspire to and imitate, such as Sarah, Noah, Christian elders, and, especially, Jesus Christ, who is Christianity’s exemplar par excellence. This chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of Jesus’ exemplarity in the exhortation to slaves (and all believers) in 2:21-25. Through his passion, Jesus provided an example for Christian to imitate in their own suffering.

In this chapter, I compare the characterization of Thecla in the Latin translation of the Acts of Paul and Thecla (henceforth APT) and of Eugenia in two Latin versions of the Passion of Eugenia (BHL 2667 and 2666). As scholars have already noted, the two Passions of Eugenia differ remarkably: the references to the APT in the oldest version (BHL 2667, second half of the fifth century) are removed in the later rewriting (BHL 2666, sixth or seventh century). Based on earlier scholarship, I contextualize this rewriting as a signal of the wider tendency to use Thecla as a model of virtue, while the APT is rejected for its problematic canonicity; I do so by delving deeper into the wider Latin literature of the late antique and medieval periods. I then demonstrate the ways in which both Passions of Eugenia engage with the figure of Thecla as a model to imitate even as Eugenia surpasses her in terms of rhetoric.

This chapter compares two reading lists of Greek literature, one from the Augustan Age and one from the Second Sophistic: Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Imitation and Dio of Prusa’s letter On Training for Public Speaking (oration 18). Although several scholars have argued that the two lists are similar, this chapter argues that they are fundamentally different. Dionysius prefers Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus and Demosthenes, he ignores Hellenistic and imperial writers, and he demands that his students work hard. Dio recommends Menander, Euripides, Xenophon and Aeschines, he includes orators from the Augustan Age, and he tells his addressee that laborious training is not needed. In many points Dio’s reading list corresponds more closely to Quintilian’s contemporary canon (in Institutio oratoria book 10) than to Dionysius’ On Imitation. Three factors can explain the differences between the reading lists presented by Dionysius and Dio: their audiences, the literary preferences of the Augustan Age and the Flavian Age, and the genres of their works. Dionysius’ reading list is part of a serious rhetorical treatise which foregrounds the ‘beauty’ of classical Greek literature. Dio’s reading list is presented in a light-hearted letter which adopts a more pragmatic (and at times humoristic) approach to rhetorical imitation.

A wide-ranging study of Plato’s treatment in the Republic of the forms and institutions of a society’s culture (anthropologically understood), and the way culture shapes character through its operation, often gradual and imperceptible, upon the soul. Topics discussed in detail include Book X’s account of the structures within the human soul that Plato identifies in describing and explaining the way culture impacts upon it; Book II’s account of the first ‘economic’ city and its successor, the city of luxury, with special attention to the use of couches in the ancient Greek’s conception and practice of the key cultural practice of civilised feasting; the puppets and the puppeteers in the Cave analogy of Book VII, interpreted as symbolising the role of cultural products and their creators in shaping human susceptibility to cultural formation; and Book X’s discussion of the ontological status both of cultural products as indirect imitations of Forms, and of those Forms themselves, particularly considered as the paradigms upon which a more soundly based culture might be modelled.

The book’s final chapter, on the work of Phyllis Wheatley, considers the aesthetics and politics of imitation. Wheatley’s poems both enact and challenge assimilation, by performing a form of Christian whiteness and decorum through acts of imitation for which she has been repeatedly criticised by contemporary readers. But notes of resistance can be heard in her images of chains, oceanic voyages and flight from earthly constraint. Wheatley’s poems transform constraint into ornament, but in a way that ironises her own experiences of capture and enslavement. This introduces a productive incompatibility between the prevailing aesthetic and the experience of bondage that must be overcome if the poem can be written. The chapter argues against contemporary readings of Wheatley as only a ‘sickly little black girl’, for whom whiteness itself was a constraint, and shows how she manages with limited means to particularise dominant poetic traditions to her own experience of enslavement and the Middle Passage.

In 1810, news reached Byron of the death of John Edleston, whom he had loved when he was at Cambridge. He wrote to Hobhouse that the news had left him ‘rather low’, and ‘more affected than I should care to own elsewhere; Death has been lately so occupied with every thing that was mine, that the dissolution of the most remote connection is like taking a crown from a Miser’s last Guinea’. But then he changes the subject, though in a way that may nevertheless be responding to that feeling of loss and separation.