From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this pioneering book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of ""crimes of writing""--the forgeries of George Psalmanazar, the production of ""fakelore,"" the ""ballad scandals"" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imposture of Thomas Chatterton, and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. |