ABSTRACT
The first attempts to regulate intellectual professions in the Bulgarian kingdom (founded in 1878) were linked to the advancement of printing and the press and were directly or indirectly associated with censorship in a manner reminiscent of the Ancient Regime. Conforming with Michel Foucault’s typology of the “author function,” 1 which attributes the rise of the legal figure of the author, in the first place, to his ability to carry penal responsibility for transgressive discourses, the appearance of the professional author in Bulgaria was closely connected to penalizing or interdictory objectives. The legal conception of authorship designated less the author’s prerogative to control and trade his texts in a market and more the capacity of authorities to attribute texts to the author’s person. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the figure of the author and consequently the question of authorship and ownership of texts was unstable and inconsistent. Printing acts correlated with politics and were mainly concerned with: (1) the political balance between government and opposition; and (2) the place of the press as an independent force in political life.
