Fictional depictions of plagiarism in Literature.
- Animal Farm. Snowball — by which I mean Napoleon — comes up with the idea to build a windmill.
- Animal Inn (by Virginia Vail): In book 3, Val Taylor has written an essay for a contest being held by the Humane Society. When she hands it in in class, her Alpha Bitch classmate Lila Bascombe manages to steal it and submits it under her own name. Fortunately, having written it longhand (and then typed up two copies, the second after her temporary roommate Gigi the monkey tore up the first one), Val's got it memorized and is able to recite it from heart, proving she was the original author.
- One of the subplots in Changes has to do with the discovery that Master Bard Tobias Marchand is passing off his student's work as his own.
- Dear Mr. Henshaw: At one point after he starts keeping a diary instead of writing to Boyd Henshaw on a regular basis, Leigh enters a story contest, with the top three winners getting to meet a certain famous author. His story "A Day on Dad's Rig" wins Honorable Mention; later, the second-place winner was revealed to have copied their winning poem out of a book and lost their prize as a result, and Leigh gets to go in their place.
- In the opening to the Discworld spin-off Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, the overseer at the publishing house points out to his superior that Nanny's writing consists of taking any work she finds interesting, copying it out onto old sugar bags, and signing it G. Ogg in crayon. His boss reassures him that this is "research", and perfectly fine.
- The protagonist of Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside makes his (not very good) living by selling plagiarized papers to college students.
- In Kurt Vonnegut's short story, "EPICAC", the narrator steals poems written by the computer EPICAC and passes them off as his own, in order to get Pat Kilgallen to marry him.
- Family Skeleton Mysteries: The plot of the fourth book involves Georgia and Sid discovering someone has been responsible for stealing and selling artwork belonging to the students at the art college she's now working for, and one of her co-professors got killed over it.
- In Fangirl, Cath writes some Simon Snow fanfiction and turns it in for a college assignment. Her professor gives her an F, arguing that while the story might have been original, using someone else's world and characters makes it plagiarism.
- I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan is presented as TV character Alan Partridge's poorly-written and nakedly self-serving autobiography. At one point in this book, he copies much of Wikipedia's article on frequency modulation.
- Jaine Austen Mysteries: In Death of a Neighborhood Witch, this is revealed to be the motive for Peter Connor murdering Cryptessa. Cryptessa showed him the horror story she had been writing for years because he is a book editor. Legally he couldn't take it because it was unsolicited, but when he read the manuscript she left on his doorstep, he found it was actually pretty good. He had grown jealous of his clients making big bucks on books, and figured he wanted in on the action. He murdered Cryptessa once he found out she hadn't shown the manuscript to anyone.
- One of the motives in the Judge Dee mystery "The Lacquer Screen". The villain wanted to be rid of his wife because she was cheating on him, but the reason he had to kill her was that if he divorced her, it would come out that all of his best poetry was actually her work.
- Stephen Fry's The Liar contains the oft-quoted line, "An original idea? That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."
- The Nero Wolfe novella Plot It Yourself revolves around plagiarism accusations.
- The Prague Cemetery. The protagonist adapts earlier conspiracy theories for later clients, just changing the Big Bad concerned (Jesuits, Bonapartists, Jews). Doing so helps reinforce each conspiracy theory in the public mind, as people would vaguely remember hearing something similar, thus helping to 'authenticate' his own work.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Main character Oliver Horn is warned by Richard Andrews in volume 1 that Professor Darius Grenville has a habit of taking promising students under his wing so that he can later steal their research for use in his own projects. Later, Grenville indeed offers to make Oliver his apprentice, but Oliver kills Grenville in a Wizard Duel for unrelated reasons before that can happen.
- P. G. Wodehouse wrote two very similar school stories in which a compulsory poetry competition is run and the protagonist asks a friend for help. In one, the friend copies the entry out of a book; in the other, he writes an entry, but his drafts get misplaced and copied in turn.
- In "Who's Cribbing?", first published in Startling Stories in 1953, a would-be science fiction writer gets every one of his story submissions rejected, each time with a letter saying it's too similar to a story already published decades before by an obscure author named Todd Thromberry. Further investigation leads him to form a theory that Thromberry somehow found a way to look into the future and steal his stories before they were written. In the end, he writes up an account of the experience and sends it to a science fiction magazine in the hope that its readers can offer some explanation — only to have it returned with a letter saying they can't publish it because it's too similar to a story by Todd Thromberry.
- Zombies of the Gene Pool:
- Played with: the book starts off with English professor Marion ripping an unnamed freshman a new one, after said freshman wrote a paper accusing Joseph Conrad of plagiarizing Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. note
- Comes up again later — Marion points out the similarities between various stories written by the Lanthanides; Reuben Mistral brushes it off by saying they lived out of each others' pockets in those days and were bound to have hung onto a few ideas from the old times. But then Marion reveals the real point, namely that Erik Giles' writing style is nothing like his supposed Pen Name C.A. Stormcock's, but Stormcock's is very similar to the late Peter Deddingfield's writing, revealing that Giles and Deddingfield traded their names many years ago.
