Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes
• Geoffrey Sanborn (bio)

Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature
claudia stokes
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022
272 pp.

Powerful cultural concepts sometimes slow the forward motion of one's thinking as one approaches them. When I try to explain to other people what I think about plagiarism—that it is the flip side of a cultural fetishization of originality, that it is not always criminal or indecent, that the ban on it in academic settings has productive value but the fierceness of the banning does not—everything seems to turn into wet, thick sand. I have trouble holding on to my thoughts. The thickness of the opprobrium that the concept of plagiarism generates makes it extremely difficult to speak, listen, and speak more. So when I get the chance to read a book like Claudia Stokes's Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, I'm grateful not only for what it adds to my knowledge but also for the thinking environment it makes available to me. Along with books like Robert Macfarlane's Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and Paul Saint-Amour's The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (2003), Stokes's Old Style unfolds a space in which counterintuitive, countercultural thoughts about (un)originality can roam and mingle a bit more freely.

One of the appealing aspects of Old Style is that Stokes seems to enjoy certain kinds of unoriginal writing—not plagiarism, which she describes as "outright fraud" (62), but writing that stays close to approved examples, writing that echoes the sound and sense of the literary past. When she describes what she means by unoriginality—"the enlistment of time-honored topics and narratives handed down through the generations; the deliberate invocation of signature styles and forms; quotation and allusion; and even the overt reconstruction of familiar texts or earlier literary periods" [End Page 500] (3)—she does so with the fondness and precision of a connoisseur. It is a compelling way of easing readers into a more intimate experience of works whose aesthetics are not our own. Before we pass judgment on a conventionally written work from the nineteenth century, Stokes argues, we should try to get closer to it, to sense the value of once-popular modes of expression.

Throughout Old Style, Stokes models that process of understanding for us, moving from writer to writer (Lucretia Davidson, Catherine Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, etc.) and practice to practice (copying text into commonplace books, using epigraphs, writing sequels, etc.) in an effort to evoke what it was like to live in the midst of a widespread prioritization of the familiar. In her first chapter, she presents Davidson, who died at seventeen, as a young woman who sought maturity by way of "time-honored topics and narratives" (3). According to Stokes, "compliance with literary convention provided Davidson with a route by which she could assume the persona of an adult authority figure," thereby enabling her to "serv[e] as a decisive arbiter of morality and supervise[e] the well-being of others" (30). Instead of rebelling against respectability, Davidson, whose mother, Margaret Miller Davidson, was a poet, "use[d] poetry to grasp and prepare for greater authority" (30). Interestingly, Stokes makes no effort to argue that the imitativeness of Davidson's poems destabilizes the conventions on which they are based. She argues, instead, that Davidson's "skilled literary imitation" gives her access to "familial and social authority" by "contributing and attesting to the author's character, loyalty, and reliability" (43–44).

The second chapter, a reprint of Stokes's 2018 American Literary History (vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 201–21) essay on commonplacing, puts that argument in a broader cultural context. As Stokes observes, the epigraphs that headed chapters in many nineteenth-century novels and memoirs owed a great deal to the popularity of commonplace books, in which choice quotations were preserved as a signifier of one's familiarity with "culture" and as a source of wisdom...