American Women Authors and Literary Property, 18221869 [Paperback]

Explores the relationship between copyright laws and women's writing in nineteenth-century America.American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 explores how copyright law and married women's property laws shaped the works and careers of five popular 19th-century American fiction writers-- Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune. Each woman achieved popular success while facing frustrations and obstacles commen to married women who could not own property. The book also reveals, by its inclusion of the confederacy, the different construction of author-reader relations under U.S. and Confederate copyright laws.American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 explores how copyright law and married women's property laws shaped the works and careers of five popular 19th-century American fiction writers-- Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune. Each woman achieved popular success while facing frustrations and obstacles commen to married women who could not own property. The book also reveals, by its inclusion of the confederacy, the different construction of author-reader relations under U.S. and Confederate copyright laws.Through an exploration of women authors'engagements with copyright and married women 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 Terhunee, 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 righlCs