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WHEN A WRITER OR AN ARTIST is criticized for producing imitations of prior works, her defenders usually leap to remind audiences that the borrower is actually offering accomplished examples of the master's style. Sometimes the form is imitated, sometimes the content. No matter, the naked misappropriation is often excused.
Of course, it does happen that ideas, structures, concepts, forms and shapes are simply borrowed to be reworked with imaginative skill and appropriate vitality so that something new (somewhat or even entirely) is produced. And sometimes the same theme or idea is arrived at in many places by different people who are not in contact with each other's work. Or, as is common in psychoanalysis, sometimes an earlier paper has not been read—not deliberately ignored—but buried under mountains of verbiage.
Sometimes the possibility of a new idea is seen in something else, or, another's work stimulates additional development. This happened to the eminent crystallographer Rosalind Franklin when Crick and Watson perceived the DNA model in her photographs. She remarked, afterwards, something to the effect that it was her pictures, true, but their idea.
Sometimes the words homage à are used in attribution, reminding