Authorship and Copyright.

By David Saunders; pp. ix + 269. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 35.00,[pounds] $49.95.

THIS BOOK HAS A CLEVER THESIS. UP UNTIL recently, the history of copyright has been treated as if it were evolving inevitably toward full recognition of the rights of authors. As David Saunders points out, even the most widely respected study, Lyman Ray Patterson's Copyright in Historical Perspective (1968), which demonstrates that copyright began as a publishers' right with almost no thought to authors, nonetheless treats copyright as if it should have always been concerned with the rights of the individual author (220). Saunders rightly traces this tendency to that point in history when this notion of the "author" became predominant, the Romantic era, with its conception of the author as a self-sufficient entity. His argument is that copyright could not have been the product of conceiving the author in this way, because copyright became law nearly a century before the emergence of Romanticism. Up to this point, I think, most historians of authorhood and copyright would agree with him; indeed, several have made just this claim. Saunders's next step is to argue that this notion of the author, which emphasizes individual self-realization, became a model for the education of the self. As products of such "aesthetic" education, literary historians, he concludes, mistakenly treat a particular …