The history of literary plagiarism is a story of abductions. The texts that are transformed here actually belong elsewhere, ideally in a serious literary history. For various reasons, however, they have ended up in this book, and now they sit together, sharing their tales of suffering, accusing their abductors, puzzling over the motives behind the crime they have experienced, or jointly discussing escape plans. The conversation touches on economic pressures, legal precedents, and media revolutions; on borrowed truths, unpaid bills, and outright frauds; on masters and slaves, fathers and sons, spirit and ghosts; on imitation, memory, and forgetfulness; on the body, the soul, and what plagiarism leaves behind. The unoriginal literary historian has these...