prescriptions of imitatio – resemble an author and yet be like yourself, be at once apt to your times and to your original, be at once a “character” and someone who can adapt to unexpected new occasions, express your genius and carry the impress of your source’ (p. 205), the ‘conceptual fuzziness’ (p. 106) of writing about imitation becomes a powerful resource. The title of Burrow’s tour-de-force study should be understood as the interplay between both the subjective and the objective senses of the gerund, focusing as it does both on authors who are imitators and on the act itself of imitating others. Burrow sets out – rather than sorts out – the conceptual mess of imitatio through exemplification not codification, in order to demonstrate how creative it was and remains. Eschewing the term ‘intertextuality’ (often used to describe any kind of verbal echo, contrary to Julia Kristeva’s original definition, which entailed a transposition of the characteristics of one form into another to create a new form), Burrow rightly gives short shrift to agonistic Bloomian notions of writers psychologically tormented by their poetic parents. Choosing instead to re-embed questions of imitatio in educational praxes and individual style, so that writers, however variedly, learn skills from their predecessors, Burrow pushes back against imitation as verbal theft or appropriation, offering a positive spin on the view expressed perhaps most pointedly by Friedrich Nietzsche that modern poets are always and unavoidably beings facing backwards. The ten chapters of Imitating Authors are split into three parts covering broad periods: ‘I. Antiquity’, ‘II. Early Modernity’ and ‘III. Milton and After’. Yet if imitatio matters at all, Burrow suggests, then it still matters today, extending beyond eighteenthand nineteenth-century debates about literary property into current anxieties concerning artificial intelligence and artificial humans. The book’s concludes by bringing imitatio to bear on recent novels and films featuring human clones, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Blade Runner (1982) and its sequel (2017), along with the ‘ultra-neoclassical’ (p. 391) TV series Battlestar Galactica (2004–9), itself a remake of a 1980s show. Pace Walter Benjamin’s notion that the age of mechanical reproduction dissolves a work’s aura, fears of exact human replication intensify the value attached to purportedly inimitable attributes like consciousness, creativity and imagination. These contemporary concerns coherently intersect with the long history of imitatio and profound debates about what it means to be a human being and a language user, both of which entail learning by imitation from the outset. Burrow’s impressive study proves that imitatio still lives with us and remains a powerful driver of literary history.

中文翻译：

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书评：加文·默里-米勒：革命的欧洲：跨国背景下的政治、社区和文化，1775-1922 年

模仿的处方——像作者又像自己，既贴合时代又贴合原著，既是“人物”又是能够适应意想不到的新场合的人，能表达你的天才并带有您的来源”（第 205 页），关于模仿的写作的“概念模糊性”（第 106 页）成为一种强大的资源。Burrow 的巡回研究的标题应该被理解为动名词的主观和客观感觉之间的相互作用，因为它既关注模仿者的作者，也关注模仿他人的行为本身。伯罗通过例证而非编纂来阐述——而不是整理——模仿的概念混乱，以展示它是多么有创意，并且仍然如此。避免使用“互文性”一词（通常用于描述任何类型的口头回声，与 Julia Kristeva 的原始定义相反，后者需要将一种形式的特征转换为另一种形式以创建新形式），Burrow 正确地对 agonistic作家的布卢姆式观念在心理上受到他们诗意的父母的折磨。相反，选择在教育实践和个人风格中重新嵌入模仿问题，以便作家，无论多么多样，都可以从他们的前辈那里学习技能，伯罗反对将模仿视为口头盗窃或挪用，对可能最常见的观点提出积极的看法弗里德里希·尼采 (Friedrich Nietzsche) 指出，现代诗人总是且不可避免地是面向后的人。模仿作者的十章分为三个部分，涵盖了广泛的时期：“我。古代”，“二。早期现代性”和“III. 米尔顿和之后'。然而，如果模仿真的很重要，Burrow 认为，那么它在今天仍然很重要，从 18 和 19 世纪关于文学财产的辩论延伸到当前对人工智能和人工人类的焦虑。这本书的结尾是模仿最近以克隆人为特色的小说和电影，包括石黑一雄的《永不让我走》（2005 年）、银翼杀手（1982 年）及其续集（2017 年），以及“超新古典主义”（p . 391) 电视剧太空堡垒卡拉狄加 (2004–9)，它本身就是 1980 年代节目的翻拍。佩斯·沃尔特·本杰明 (Pace Walter Benjamin) 认为机械复制时代消解了作品的光环，对精确人类复制的恐惧加剧了对意识、创造力和想象力等据称不可模仿的属性的重视。这些当代关注与模仿的悠久历史以及关于成为人类和语言使用者意味着什么的深刻辩论密切相关，两者都需要从一开始就通过模仿学习。伯罗令人印象深刻的研究证明，模仿仍然存在于我们之中，并且仍然是文学史的强大驱动力。