Fashioning Intellectual Property: Exhibition, Advertising and the Press, 1789-1918 by Megan Richardson & Professor Julian Thomas

Author:Megan Richardson & Professor Julian Thomas
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Modern (16th-21st Centuries), Intellectual Property, Education & Reference, Law, 19th Century, History
ISBN: 9780521767569
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-02-19T18:30:00+00:00

Cambridge Books Online

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/

Fashioning Intellectual Property

Exhibition, Advertising and the Press, 1789–1918

Megan Richardson, Julian Thomas

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139045551

Online ISBN: 9781139045551

Hardback ISBN: 9780521767569

Chapter

9 - Rethinking ‘Romantic’ authorship pp. 103-115

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139045551.014

Cambridge University Press

9

Rethinking ‘Romantic’ authorship

In The Construction of Authorship , Peter Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee

claim that the Romantic idea of the author-genius exercised ‘consistent,

shaping pressure’ on modern Anglo-American copyright law , serving

the interests of publishers and distributors rather well. 1 This is now the

conventional view of the author-function in copyright law, especially

American law, although it has been challenged. 2 Our review of British

and colonial law also calls the conventional view into question. By the

end of the nineteenth century, the line of legal reasoning being devel-

oped by English courts embodied a rather different set of authorial and

publishing interests from their American counterparts, centred expli-

citly around a prosaic view of the modern author’s contribution and

entitlements. Besides, we wonder whether Romantic authors adhered

strongly to the author-genius principle, let alone those who came after.

Rather, we suggest, the author-genius notion was from time to time a

trope for certain Romantic and Victorian authors to seek to promote and

advance their interests in relation to reform of certain specii c aspects

of copyright law, making use of the persuasive language of advertising

(even before persuasion was recognised as part of the new advertiser’s

role). And it was not entirely rel ected either in the more utilitarian

framework of the law.

Naturally, Jaszi and Woodmansee refer to that most well-known user

of the author-genius trope, William Wordsworth . Interestingly, however,

1 Peter Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee, ‘Introduction’ to Martha Woodmansee and

Peter Jaszi (eds.),

The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and

Literature , Duke University Press, 1994, 1 at p. 5 and passim . See also the chapters by Woodmansee, ‘On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity’ and Jaszi, ‘On the

Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity’: ibid ., 15 and 29.

To similar effect see also Martha Woodmansee in ‘The Genius and the Copyright:

Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the “Author”

’ (

1984 ) 17

Eighteenth-Century Studies 425. Cf. Ronan Deazley,

Rethinking Copyright: History,

Theory Language , Edward Elgar, 2006.

2 See especially David Saunders,

Authorship and Copyright , Routledge,

1992 and

Deazley, Rethinking Copyright .

103

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104

Fashioning Intellectual Property

even Wordsworth’s choices of language in talking about authorship over

the long period of his life show more l exibility than is often attributed

to him in conceiving of his craft. For instance in his ‘Advertisement’

p rei xed to Lyrical Ballads , when this volume of poetry was i rst pub-

lished anonymously in 1798 – at a time when Wordsworth and his friend

Coleridge, who provided some of the poems for the volume, were poets

of small and rather low reputation (Wordsworth’s name was ‘nothing’

to the audience, Coleridge told their publisher Joseph Cottle , 3 while

‘mine stinks’) – it is posited modestly that:

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They

were written chiel y with a view to ascertain how far the language of conver-

sation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of

poetic pleasure.

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