American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869Through 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. |
Other editions - View all
American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 Melissa J. Homestead No preview available - 2005 |
American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 Melissa J. Homestead No preview available - 2010 |
Common terms and phrases
abolitionist Advertiser American authors American Literature antebellum argues Augusta Jane Evans authorship Belford Bradburn British Bryant career Catharine Maria Sedgwick Catharine Sedgwick century chap circulation claim common law Confederacy Congress contract copy copyright advocates copyright debates copyright law copyright statute court coverture cultural dispossession divorce E. D. E. N. Southworth edition editor Elmo England Evans's Fanny Fern Fern's fiction Greenwood Grier Harriet Beecher Stowe husband infringement international copyright labors letter literary market literary property literary proprietorship Macaria marriage married women married women's property Mary Gove Musical World nation New-England Tale newspaper Nineteenth-Century America Northern novel Olive Branch papers Parton petition Phemie Phemie's Temptation political property rights proprietor published readers reading registered reprinting republican Review royalties Ruth Hall Scribner sketches slave slavery Southern status Stowe's Terhune's Thomas translation True Flag Uncle Tom's Cabin University Press wife woman women authors writing wrote York