LAW & LITERATURE WORKSHOP SERIES
Faculty of Law University of Toronto
presents
Dr. Elizabeth F. Judge
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
‘The Poor Arts of our Poachers of Popularity’:
Defoe and the Discourse of Originality, Copyright, and Piracy”
12:30 – 2:00
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall - 84 Queen’s Park
In a letter to Samuel Richardson in 1739, Aaron Hill asserted he “always detested, as I shall always continue to detest, the poor arts of our poachers of popularity.” Hill tells Richardson that he is going to assign him the “property” of the “production of [Hill’s] pen” so he can avoid a posthumous publication by a collector of “quantity” rather than quality,” that is the pirates, as many eighteenth-century critics would have contended, who poach the creative efforts of others. Hill is referring to unsavoury publishers, but the evocative phrase of those who conduct the “poor arts of our poachers of popularity” also fits other eighteenth-century phenomena which track 1) first, the uncertainty of the fact-fiction divide in the emerging genre of the novel, illustrated by the accusations of piracy against Defoe for appropriating Selkirk’s biography for Robinson Crusoe; 2) second, the uneven divide between authors and readers, illustrated by what we would today call fan fiction, in which newly imagined episodes are written for fictional characters who had been created and popularized by another author; and 3) the chaotic publishing industry and their unauthorized abridgments, sequels and collections, illustrated by the later 18th century publishers Nobles and their bowdlerized and sentimentalized versions of Moll Flanders and Roxana created for their circulating libraries.
Setting these phenomena against the more traditional “piracy” concept of publishers transgressing by reprinting literary texts verbatim can illuminate the nuanced and contested notion of eighteenth-century “piracy” and highlight how elastic the idea of “poachers of popularity” could be, stretching to embrace not only the legal violations by printers but moral transgressions by writers and booksellers against the muddled notions of “authorship” and “originality.” Authors’ and publishers’ aesthetic, economic and legal rights were intertwined in the history of copyright and publishing, but significantly piracy was not coterminous with the legal rights alone. The paper focuses on Defoe, his reactions to the spurious fictional sequels, his role in the copyright debates, and the legal and literary resonances in his treatment of pirates in his fiction. By examining the discourse of originality, authorship, piracy, and copyright circulating around Defoe’s novels and the piracy allegations surrounding Defoe’s use of Selkirk’s biography, the unauthorized reprintings, abridgments, fan fiction, and the sentimentalized and bowdlerized editions of Defoe by the Nobles, the paper seeks to identify eighteenth-century legal and aesthetic distinctions between publishers’ piracy of text versus other acts that were alleged to be appropriation and to historicize the definition and context of piracy.
Dr. Elizabeth F. Judge is an Associate Professor and member of the Law and Technology group at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, where she specializes in intellectual property, law and literature, and privacy. She is the co-author of Intellectual Property: The Law in Canada and Le droit de la propriété intellectuelle and other publications on law and literature. Her recent research focuses on eighteenth century conceptions of authorship, originality, and copyright, and looks closely at the phenomenon of eighteenth-century fan fiction and legal and moral claims to fictional characters in this period. Dr. Judge holds an honours Bachelor of Arts from Brown University (English and American Literature; Political Science), a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Master of Arts (English) from the University of Toronto, and a Master of Laws and a Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature from Dalhousie University, and she has taught in both law and literature. Prior to joining the Faculty of Law, she practised law in Washington, D.C., and she has served as a law clerk to the Honourable Mr. Justice Ian Binnie at the Supreme Court of Canada.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
