Crimes of Writing Problems in the Containment of Representation [Hardcover]

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.

It has become an article of faith in history and literary studies that the best way of understanding the text is to look at the margins, the best way to understand the norm is to look at that which is designated abnormal, deviant and reprehensible. The difficulty with applying this article of faith, is that it requires an extraordinary patience and skill with texts and historical records if it is not to be a justification for self-indulgentgrotesquerie. In this book, Susan Stewart shows how fascinating this technique can be when applied by a careful and lucid scholar. In a series of meticulously researched essays, she helps us to understand authorship and text by focusing on a variety of crimes of writing --graffiti, pornography, forgery and literary imposture. At the same time, she shows how law is both implicated in and threatened by the containment of representation. --James Boyle,Washington College of Law, American University

Susan Stewart is one of the most extraordinary cultural critics writing ils*