Authorship and Copyright

First published in 1992, Authorship and Copyright traces the history of constructions of authorship as a legal reality. It offers an alternative to the two mainstream interpretations that have traditionally been assigned to authorship: the Romantic dialectical ‘birth of the author’ or the language-based post-structuralist ‘death of the author.’ Saunders examines the shortcomings of both schemes by arguing that they impose an arbitrary philosophical direction on the history of authorship and...