Through an exploration of women authors'engagements with copyright and married women 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 Terhunee, 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. Homesteads' 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.

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"Although a self-styled act of "literary recovery," Melissa Homestead's American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 seems to me actually nothing less than a revisionary literary history of the heyday of women's writing - and the conditions underlying and regulating its composition and circulation - in the United States. Based on a perceptive reading of nineteenth-century copyright as a central agency in the formation of the field of letters, it adroitly explains how the terms and structures of copyright, especially in a society fast moving toward the commercialization of its culture, not only regulated the circulation of texts but defined the parameters of authorship--in particular, the possibilities available to the emergent category of women authors." Ezra Greenspan, Kahn Chair in the Humanities, Southern Methodist University

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Product details

• Date Published: June 2010
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9780521154758
• length: 286 pages

• dimensions: 229 x 152 x 16 mm
• weight: 0.42kg
• availability: Available