Properties of the mind: Prose fiction and intellectual property in Tudor England

My dissertation argues that an emerging concept of intellectual property in sixteenth-century England helped produce a qualitatively new corpus of prose fiction that served as a vital link between ancient and medieval prose works and the modern novel. I propose that recent and early modern insights into the economic privatization of literature can strongly contribute to new aesthetic evaluations of such fiction. Although the phrase 'intellectual property' does not appear until the nineteenth century, a cautious use of the term allows us to apprehend social and literary configurations that might otherwise seem a random assemblage of facts and practices. New legal and economic formations, such as book privileges, patents and the incorporated Stationers' Company, caused writers and publishers to re-evaluate the status of fiction and the cultural function of imitation and experimentation in the Tudor period.; Much of the criticism of the last twenty years has concentrated on the role, plasticity and boundaries of the individual and the nation. Building on recent works about post-Tudor periods (by such scholars as Jeffrey Masten and Margaret Ezell), my project makes a strong claim for the continuing cultural primacy of groups and communities throughout the sixteenth century. I pay close attention to how textual communities---primarily those constituted by writers, stationers, patrons, and readers, but also those within works of fiction---were formed and represented. The forms such communities took shaped both literary creations and expectations. Scholars of intellectual property who have looked to the sixteenth century have generally overemphasized censorship or ignored the aesthetic implications of intellectual property. My project is the first to explore the aesthetic qualities of Tudor fiction in relation to the legal and economic aspects of printing and the development of intellectual property. Focusing on questions of material production and the organization of the literary and social imagination, I construct my arguments on close analyses of individual works, from Thomas More's Utopia through Sir Philip Sidney's The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia to the works of Thomas Nashe.