American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869
Cambridge University Press
Edition: First Edition, 1/26/2006
EAN 9780521853828, ISBN10: 0521853826
Hardcover, 286 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Through an exploration of women authors' engagements with copyright and married women's property laws, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869, revises nineteenth-century American literary history, making women's authorship and copyright law central. Using case studies of five popular fiction writers - Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune - Homestead shows how the convergence of copyright and coverture both fostered and constrained white women's agency as authors. Women authors exploited their status as nonproprietary subjects to advantage by adapting themselves to a copyright law that privileged readers'access to literature over authors' property rights. Homestead's inclusion of the Confederacy in this work sheds light on the centrality of copyright to nineteenth-century American nationalisms and on the strikingly different construction of author reader relations under U.S. and Confederate copyright laws.
Introduction
'lady-writers' and 'copyright, authors, and authorship' in nineteenth-century America
1. Authors, wives, slaves
coverture, copyright, and authorial dispossession, 1831–1869
2. Suited to the market
Catharine Sedgwick, female authorship, and the literary property debates, 1822–1842
3. When I can read my title clear
Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Stowe v. Thomas Copyright Infringement case (1853)
4. Every body sees the theft
Fanny Fern and periodical reprinting in the 1850s
5. A 'rank rebel' lady and her literary property
Augusta Jane Evans and copyright, the Civil War and after, 1861–1868
Epilogue. Belford v. Scriber (1892) and the ghost of Mary Virginia Terhune's Phemie's Temptation (1869)
or, the lessons of the 'lady-writers' of the 1820's through the 1860s for literary history and twenty-first-century copyright law.