The area of literary rights is confusing for scholars whose work focuses on collaborative materials particularly materials of earlier Native American writers. Questions arise over authorship and the determination of literary heirs . For example, recognition of heirs turns on the European-based assumption of the private ownership of a written statement. The first person to writer down an oral tale can become legally recognized as the owner of that version of the story, just as the first chemist to patent a tribal healing practice becomes the owner of the resulting chemical formula. This instance on private rather than collective ownership, derived from the nineteenth-century notion of the autonomous, creative, authorial voice, flies in the face of those who come from an oral tradition. Thus a scholar concerned with finding literary heirs in order to afford them the benefits of copyright laws must in so doing accede to legal concept of ownership that has been used to appropriate knowle...
Late-eighteenth-century English cultural authorities seemingly concurred that women readers should favor history, seen as edifying, than fiction, which was regarded as frivolous and reductive. Readers of Marry Ann Hanway’s novel Andrew Stewart, or the Northern Wanderer, learning that its heroine delights in David Hume’s and Edward Gibbon’s histories, could conclude that she was more virtuous and intelligent than her sister, who disdains such reading. Likewise, while the naïve, novel-addicted protagonist of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, finds history a chore, the sophisticated, sensible character Eleanor Tilney enjoys it more than she does the Gothic fiction Catherine prefers. Yet in both cases, the praise of history is more double-edged than it might actually appear. Many readers have detected a protofeminist critique of history in Catherine’s protest that she dislikes reading books filled with men “and hardly any women at all.” Hanway, meanwhile...
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