Saint-Amour, Paul K.  The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003.

        Paul Saint-Amour's study is primarily concerned with British copyright discourse from the late Victorian period through the beginning of modernism.  His eponymous pun seeks to capture the extralegal dimension of copyright law - namely, the interests and prejudices of those who set and implement the law, for instance, in favor of certain forms of creativity at the expense of others.  The goal of the book is to argue that literature began thinking about copyright when terms began extending in the nineteenth century, and that for the sake of future literature, copyright protection must be significantly "thinned."  Originality, Saint-Amour argues, is "only ever meaningfully a dialogical cultural phenomenon - a complexly intersubjective, intertextual product of social processes of consensus, contestation, distortion, and occlusion."  The chapter pertinent to my study involves what Saint-Amour calls the "hauntology" of copyright, the process by which an author "lives" beyond death in the form of a continued monopoly over her works, even though she herself no longer exists to control the privacy of that intellectual property. 

        The 1998 Sunny Bono Copyright Act led a veiled assault on the public domain in the name of the artists' memory, effectively turning intellectual property into "a memento mori."  This skews the public perception so that the public views copyright as the province of artists rather than as the province of copyright holders.  Since Wordsworth believed that poets create the taste by which they are to be enjoyed, he expected that the greatest remuneration for his poetry would come posthumously.  As a result, he thought that copyright should be perpetual, so that an artist's heirs can enjoy the benefits that ought to have occurred to the artist in her lifetime.  Wordsworth grew more conservative with age, but what about Moore, and the avant-garde more generally?  Given that an avant-garde presents itself as a force for change in society, are its views on intellectual property necessarily in favor of an expanded public domain?  Unlike some of the other modernists, Moore made a living off of her writing, so these are questions that touch on her use of quotation and her attitude to copyright more generally.   

Inidividualism as a creed, its effects on form and the relationship to nature, of the Romantic hero.  Role of imagination, its 'esemplastic,' mediating, modifying powers, at work. Relative importance of feeling, its expression, 'overflow,' 'spontaneous.'

worthwhile choronological chart of publications

2nd edition (1979) pp. 119-209 cited by mark evan bonds