ABSTRACT
Book historians have often seen copyright law as the legal instrument that enabled the emergence of the modern gure of the author. Roger Chartier in ‘The Figure of the Author’ identied two lines of argument that scholars have alternatively used to dene the notion of the modern author in the commercial marketplace: one, based in the discourse of eighteenth-century subjectivity and private property, recognized in the 1710 Queen Anne Statute and in the parallel French pre-revolutionary edict of 1777 the rst attempts to limit the monopoly of the printers to the benet of the author. The other argument, retracing the Foucauldian notion of punishment and repression as a powerful mechanism of identity-formation, insists on the role of censorship in establishing the gure of the author, since legislation required a legal subject responsible for the political content of a given publication.2 An example of the latter is present also in the debate on anonymity vs. signature in the periodical press in the early part of the nineteenth century, where the push to abandon anonymity in favour of a policy of signature was likewise related to the need to be able to respond to the law in case of libel suits.3
