American women authors and literary property, 1822-1869 / Melissa J. Homestead.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: "Lady-writers" and "Copyright, authors, and authorship" in nineteenth-century America -- Authors, wives, slaves: coverture, copyright, and authorial dispossession, 1831-1869 -- "Suited to the market": Catharine Sedgwick, female authorship, and the literary property debates, 1822-1842 -- "When I can read my title clear": Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Stowe v. Thomas copyright infringement case (1853) -- "Every body sees the theft": Fanny Fern and periodical reprinting in the 1850s -- A "rank rebel" lady and her literary property: Augusta Jane Evans and copyright, the Civil War and after, 1861-1868 -- Epilogue: Belford v. Scribner (1892) and the ghost of Mary Virginia Terhune's Phemie's temptation (1869); or, The lessons of the "Lady-writers" of the 1820s through the 1860s for literary history and twenty-first-century copyright law.

Print version record.

Through an exploration of women authors' engagements with copyright and married women's 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 Terhune - 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. Homestead's 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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