Joseph Loewenstein. Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship.(Book Review)

(Cambridge Studies in English Literature and Culture, 43.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. index. illus. xii + 221 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-521-81217-8.

This book proposes itself as an ancillary study to The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: 2002), and includes in revised and amplified forms material published in Joseph Loewenstein's groundbreaking essays of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which he first identified the emergence of "the bibliographic ego" (2) in early modern writers. Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship explores the evolution of authorial prestige, a cultural transformation often associated with Jonson's canny promotion of his texts as literature and even as works, but situates …