"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
Product Description
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.
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