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Zusatztext ...it is an extremely inventive book, full of ingenious twists and turns...it is a testament to the book's intellectual ambition that it takes such a playful (occasionally very literal, sometimes exceedingly metaphorical) view of its subject, constantly seeking to test its ingenuity against the work of great authors. Gregory Dart, Times Literary Supplement Informationen zum Autor Clare Pettitt worked in journalism and theatre in London for six years before completing a D.Phil at Oxford University, and then taking up a lectureship in Victorian literature at Leeds University in 1997. She is currently Director of Studies and Lecturer in English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has published several articles about Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. Klappentext This book examines the shared rhetoric surrounding the creation of the "inventor" and the "author" in the 1830s, and the challenge of the emerging technologies of mass production to traditional ideas of art and industry. Patent Inventions argues that Victorian writers used the novel not just to reflect, but also to challenge received notions of intellectual ownership and responsibility, using close readings of work by Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Eliot, and Hardy. Zusammenfassung Although much has been written about the history of copyright and authorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, very little attention has been given to the impact of the development of other kinds of intellectual property on the ways in which writers viewed their work in this period. This book is the first to suggest that the fierce debates over patent law and the discussion of invention and inventors in popular texts during the nineteenth century informed the parallel debate over the professional status of authors. The book examines the shared rhetoric surrounding the creation of the 'inventor' and the 'author' in the debate of the 1830s, and the challenge of the emerging technologies of mass production to traditional ideas of art and industry is addressed in a chapter on authorship at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Subsequent chapters show how novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot participated in debates over the value and ownership of labour in the 1850s, such as patent reform and the controversy over married women's property. The book shows the ways in which these were reflected in their novels. It also suggests that the publication of those novels, and the celebrity of their authors, had a substantial effect on the subsequent direction of these debates. The final chapter shows that Thomas Hardy's later fiction reflects an important shift in thinking about creativity and ownership towards the end of the century. Patent Inventions argues that Victorian writers used the novel not just to reflect, but also to challenge received notions of intellectual ownership and responsibility. It ends by suggesting that detailed study of the debate over intellectual property in the nineteenth century leads to a better understanding of the complex negotiations over the bounds of selfhood and social responsibility in the period. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1: Introductory: Heroes and Hero-Worship: Inventors and Writers from 1818 to 1900 2: Property in Labour: Inventors and Writers in the 1830s and 1840s 3: The Art of Inventing and the Inventor as Artist: Intellectual Property at the Great Exhibtion 4: 'The spirit of craft and money-making': The Indignities of Literature in the 1850s 5: Women, Risk, and Intellectual Property: Elizabeth Gaskell and George Elliot in the 1860s 6: 'The singing of the wire': Hardy, International Copyright, and the Ether ...
