From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this pioneering 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. In this way, she emphasizes the issues which 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.
- ISBN10 6610533423
- ISBN13 9786610533428
- Publish Date 15 August 1991
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 29 February 2012
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 368
- Language English