SOURCE: Danson, Lawrence. “You Said It.” Nation 250, no. 6 (12 February 1990): 208-10.

In the following review, Danson notes that Mallon offers a very concrete and objective opinion of plagiarism in Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism.

Plagiarism! The word strikes terror in the fainting authorial soul. If you've ever been a victim—ever seen your own well-wrought words come back to you in alienated majesty signed with someone else's name—you'll know why the word “violation,” more commonly used to describe another form of self-dispossession, is no exaggeration. And if you've ever looked carefully at your own words, as I've just looked at my preceding two sentences, and found three unacknowledged quotations (from sources, I assure you, Reader, safely dead), you'll know why plagiarism haunts the writer's imagination. It troubles the mind with metaphysical speculation: How do words come to be owned? How can the impalpable...