Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel

by Clare Pettitt

Overview

This book examines the shared rhetoric surrounding the creation of the "inventor" and the "author" in the 1830s, and the challenge of the emerging technologies of mass production to traditional ideas of art and industry. Patent Inventions argues that Victorian writers used the novel not just to reflect, but also to challenge received notions of intellectual ownership and responsibility, using close readings of work by Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Eliot, and Hardy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199253203
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/20/2004
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Clare Pettitt worked in journalism and theatre in London for six years before completing a D.Phil at Oxford University, and then taking up a lectureship in Victorian literature at Leeds University in 1997. She is currently Director of Studies and Lecturer in English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has published several articles about Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. 'Solitary and Abhorred': Genius and Invention in the Late Eighteenth Century2. Heroes and Hero-Worship: the Construction of the Inventor in the 1830s and 1840s3. Exhibition and Empire: Self-Help and British Supremacy4. Patents and Intellectual Property in a Mass Culture: Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and George Eliot's Early Fiction5. The Body as Machine: Gaskell, Dickens, and Eliot in the 1860sConclusionsBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Breaks new ground in the way in which it moves among literary, manufacturing, and legal issues. It offers an extremely illuminating study of the development of ideas concerning invention and intellectual property in the nineteenth century, and their implications for theories of the literary marketplace, authorship and readership, and individualism."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

From the Publisher