Patent Inventions Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel [Hardcover]

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 Inventionsargues 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.

Introduction
1. 'Solitary and Abhorred': Genius and Invention in the Late Eighteenth Century
2. Heroes and Hero-Worship: the Construction of the Inventor in the 1830s and 1840s
3. Exhibition and Empire: Self-Help and British Supremacy
4. Patents and Intellectual Property in a Mass Culture: Charles Dickens'sLittle Dorritand George Eliot's Early Fiction
5. The Body as Machine: Gaskell, Dickens, and Eliot in the 1860s
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

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

Clare Pettittworked in journalism and theatre in London for six years before completing a D.Phil at Oxford University, and then taking up a lectureship in Victorian literature at Leeds University in 1997. She is currently Director of Studies and Lecturer in English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has published several articles about Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and is a regular contributor to theTimes Literary Supplement.