Authorship and Copyright

Combining information and polemic, this book addresses issues relating to copyright and the construction of authorship as legal status, exploring such matters as the aestheticization of law and the juridification of aesthetics.

---

Law and literature are both products of their particular social context. Law relating to literature, and to the written word generally, has traditionally been assigned two mainstream interpretations: the romantic dialectical "birth of the author" or the language-based post-structuralist "death of the author". This book examines the shortcomings of both schemes by arguing that they impose an arbitrary philosophical direction on the works discussed. Challenging the text-centred preoccupation of the Law and Literature Movement, this book explores how an anthropological model of "personality" can be deployed for the historical description of legal and cultural affairs. It addresses the issues relating to copyright and the legal status of authorship and combines information and polemic to confront such issues as the historical and theoretical relations of copyright and the "droit moral", the aestheticization of the law and the juridification of aesthetics to argue that authorship is a variable arrangement that cannot be separated from its cultural context.