Literary Symbiosis

"It is only the unimaginative who ever invents," Oscar Wilde once remarked. "The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything." Converying a similar awareness, James Joyce observes in Finnegan's Wake that storytelling is in reality "stolen-telling," that art always involves some sort of "theft" or borrowing. Usually literary borrowings are so integrated into the new work as to be disguised; however, according to David Cowart, recent decades have seen an