Antebellum Authorship and the Common Property of American Literature

Meredith L. McGill. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 376 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

We live, of course, in the midst of a communications revolution. New media technology has transformed the way we create, disseminate, and store knowledge of all sorts. It is possible, for instance, to have the headlines and stories in online newspapers and periodicals personalized to one's own interests. On the Internet, any text becomes protean, circulated through complex networks of reference and exchange, transformed by new practices of interactive literacy. Coteries of users working at desktop computers collaborate on the virtual publication of "zines," while "wikis" enable readers to edit and alter texts at will. The output of commercial music and film producers can be "sampled," appropriated and reformatted in a digital commons that is global in scope, creating the same opportunities for piracy that also emerged with the Xerox machine and videocassette recording, but on a vastly larger scale. In such an environment, the basic concepts by which we understand intellectual life—reading, writing, authorship, publishing, and libraries—inevitably require revision.

Since Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), a large body of scholarship in Europe and North America has furnished a wide-ranging and often ingenious genealogy for modern changes in communication, dissecting the ways that people assimilate media into life practices, institutions, and values we call culture.¹ Like much of this scholarship, Meredith McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting is haunted by a complex and historically urgent question: how was the form and importance of printed texts transformed by emerging systems of mass production? In taking up this question, McGill turns to a fascinating and neglected phenomenon she calls the culture of reprinting which, for approximately twenty years through the 1830s and 1840s, produced a media environment that, not unlike some facets of our own, tended to undermine the material form of texts as well as their stable attribution to authors. Along with evangelical tracts and works of popular science, medical, agricultural, legal and school textbooks were "freely excerpted, imitated, plagiarized, and reissued." Essays, tales, and poems were "copied from British and American periodicals and reassembled into literary weeklies and monthlies," appearing anonymously or under pseudonyms that made it very difficult for authors—let alone literary critics today—to determine "exactly where, in what formats, and how extensively their poems and tales circulated" (pp. 108, 17).

At the outset, McGill seeks to show how debates about intellectual property shaped the production and distribution of American literature from the 1830s to the 1850s, the material forms in which poetry and fiction were written and read, and the diffuse processes by which elite literary culture was adapted to the exigencies and values of mass culture. In a landmark case concerning domestic copyright, Wheaton v. Peters (1834), the Supreme Court established a narrow interpretation of authors' rights. This case established "going-into-print as the moment when individual rights give way to the demands of the social and defines the private ownership of printed text as the temporary alienation of public property" (p. 46). A book remained the exclusive property of the author only while it remained entirely and inaccessibly private—in manuscript. Once it was printed, however, a text came to belong to the public sphere, because it was essentially a copy, susceptible to further uncontrolled copying. By granting only temporary statutory protection to authors, antebellum law ruled that the federal interest in the circulation of ideas finally outweighed the common law right of private individuals to indefinite ownership of their property.

In her second chapter, McGill uses American resistance to international copyright to demonstrate how the Republican dream of the universal dissemination of knowledge was codified in a peculiar and historically specificsystem of reprinting, or republication. The resistance to international copyright in the United States was motivated...