"Words and Persons: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
and Intellectual Property in the Early Nineteenth
Century"
| Frankenstein is often read as a statement in prose that either embodies a quintessentially romantic way of thinking about authors and artworks, or one that offers a trenchant critique of those quintessentially romantic notions. In this paper I suggest that Shelley's depiction of an author locked in mortal combat with his own words helps us place romantic authorship in a more social context, in particular, one that considers the very real ways that books, readers, and authors were materially altered by the dynamic relations between them. To do this, I will place Shelley's novel in the context of the two competing legal discourses to which texts were subject in the early nineteenth century: legislation to protect an author's right to his or her copy and prosecution for seditious or blasphemous libel. Differences in how these bodies of legal discourse weighed questions of ownership, liability, and agency reveal deep divisions in the emerging concept of literary property, divisions that Shelleyís novel bodies forth in a striking manner. At the most basic level, looking at literary property from the alternate perspective of how authors were to be protected from rival producers and how readers were to be protected from dangerous texts places the labor and interest of authors (and their agents) into conflict with the agency and interest of readers. |
copyright © 1999 by Michele T. Sharp