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Full Description
This book examines how debates over copyright law in the United States during the nineteenth century, particularly over the lack of an international copyright law, intersected with the business practices and political and artistic beliefs of American authors. These debates shaped a discourse of literary property rights that forced authors to negotiate their copyrights not only with their publishers, but with their readers as well. The author argues that the act of taking out a copyright was more than a mere legal mechanism marking a transition from amateur to professional or artist to businessperson. Taking out a copyright had a profound impact on how audiences viewed authors, how authors perceived their profession, and how they represented individual rights and property ownership within their texts. The book is unique in the scope of its research, tracking developments from the 1820s through the 1890s, and in the way it approaches the work and careers of well-known authors. The author employs research from the American Antiquarian Society, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the Government and Special Collections at the University of Iowa, drawing on an array of documents including newspaper editorials, legislative hearings, court decisions, and the public and private writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Clemens, and Emily Dickinson to demonstrate how authors found themselves in an uneasy opposition to their reading public.
Contents
List of Tables List of Figures Introduction Chapter I. James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Estate: Individual Property Rights and Monopoly Power The First Professional Author Letters for His Countrymen Home As Found Anti-Rentism and the Continuing Argument over Literary Property Cooper's Literary Estate Chapter II. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sentimental Possession Propriety and Property In the Courts of Law and Public Opinion Stowe's Literary Travels The Mistress of Canema Books and All Things Sacred The Sentimental(ized) Author-Owner Chapter III. Doing as We would be Done by: Walt Whitman, Copyright, and Democratic Exchange Giving Dickens His Due: Whitman's Budding Views International Copyright and Democracy Piracy and Poetic Ideals: The Hotten and Worthington Printings Poetic Embodiment: Leaves as Property and Poet Chapter IV. Protecting and Promoting Mark Twain: Samuel Clemens and the Uses of Copyright Holding His Claim: Roughing It and the Responsibility of Ownership The Debate Continues: International Copyright Legislation in the 1870s Copyrights and Trademarks Clemens and the Canadians Confronting Contradictions Addressing His Readers: Huckleberry Finn and International Copyright A Characteristic Performance From Miner to Property Holder Conclusion Copyright and The Auction of the Mind Works Cited
