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From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of "crimes of writing"-the forgeries of George Psalmanazar; the production of "fakelore"; the "ballad scandals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the imposture of Thomas Chatterton; and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. She emphasizes the issues that arise once language is seen as a matter of property, and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation. This valuable and pioneering work, originally published in 1991 (Oxford University Press), will be of interest to literary and legal theorists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars of eighteenth-century and postmodern culture.
List of contents
1. Crimes of Writing 3
2. Psalmanazar's Others 31
3. Notes on Distressed Genres 66
4. Scandals of the Ballad 102
5. The Birth of Authenticity in the Progress of Anxiety: Fragments of an Eighteenth-Century Daydream 132
6. Exogamous Relations: Travel Writing, the Incest Prohibition, and Hawthorne's
Transformation 173
7.
Ceci Tuera Cela: Graffiti as Crime and Art 206
8. The Marquis de Meese 235
9. Coda: Reverse Trompe l'Oeil\The Eruption of the Real 273
Works Cited 291
Index 311
About the author
Susan Stewart is Professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of On Longing, also published by Duke University Press.
Summary
Eight essays that examine particular issues in the relations between subjectivity, authenticity, writing, speech and the law.
