Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

摘要

1 There is a paradox in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, and not just the one sung about early in Act II. Monica E Cohen notes that for a work designed to denounce the piratical unauthorized productions of HMS Pinafore, which robbed Gilbert and Sullivan of both royalty checks and artistic control of their work, the pirates on stage are uniquely charming. She expected that authors who suffered from literary pirates would depict their fictional nautical pirates in the worst possible light. However, as she surveyed Victorian literature, Cohen found nautical pirates celebrated as "collaborative storytellers and comedic entertainers, figures whose affective energies make a case against Romantic originality that emphasized individual intellectual ownership by endorsing a creativity that is appropriative, recombinative, collective, and pointedly theatrical" (p.2). In Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture, Cohen explores the tension between an emerging legal order that provided greater protections for intellectual property and a culture that was collaborative and derivative.12 Before Cohen presents her introduction, she provides the reader an invaluable aid. Just as Jim's map in Treasure Island? provides a preview of the journey ahead, Cohen's chronology places in context the key literary and legal waypoints from the 1557 Royal Charter to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspapers, all the way through to the United States joining the Berne Convention in 1989. Each of the book's eight chapters features a principal author: Daniel Defoe, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J.M. Barrie.