Who Owns Literature?

The Element reveals that books are orphans once they leave their authors, vulnerable entities seeking new families to be welcomed.

Material culture scholarship explores licensing, permissions, and patronage dynamics, highlighting the estrangement of works from authors. This Element explores early modern authors' goodbyes, translators' duties, and censorship's impact on works. It explores the relevance of loss, charity, and license in literature.Interest in material culture has produced a rigorous body of scholarship that considers the dynamics of licensing, permissions, and patronage - an ongoing history of the estrangement of works from their authors. Additionally, translation studies is enabling new ways to think about the emergence of European vernaculars and the reappropriation of classical and early Christian texts. This Element emerges from these intersecting stories. How did early modern authors say goodbye to their works; how do translators and editors articulate their duty to the dead or those incapable of caring for their work; what happens once censorship is invoked in the name of other forms of protection? The notion of the work as orphan, sent out and unable to return to its author, will take us from Horace to Dante, Montaigne, Anne Bradstreet, and others as we reflect on the relevance of the vocabularies of loss, charity, and licence for literature.