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Traditionally the scene of some of London's poorest, most
crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been
misunderstood as abject and deviant. As a landing place for
migrants and newcomers, however, it has also been memorably and
colorfully represented in the literature of Victorian authors such
as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. In Strangers in the Archive,
Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and
digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper
understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian
age.Kaufman uncovers this engaging new perspective on the East End
through Maria Polack's Fiction without Romance (1830), the first
novel to be published by an English Jew, and through records of
Polack's vibrant community. Although scholars of nineteenth-century
London and readers of East End fictions persist in privileging
sensational narratives of Jack the Ripper and the infamous "Fagin
the Jew" as signs of universal depravity among East End minority
ethnic and racial groups, Strangers in the Archive considers how
archival materials are uniquely capable of redressing cultural
silences and marginalized perspectives as well as reshaping
conceptions of the global significance of literary and print
culture in nineteenth-century London. Many of this book's
subjects-including digital editions of rare books and manuscript
diaries, multimedia maps, and other related East End print
records-can be viewed online at the Lyon Archive and the Polack
Archive.
Two distinctly different meanings of piracy are ingeniously
intertwined in Monica Cohen's lively new book, which shows how
popular depictions of the pirate held sway on the page and the
stage even as their creators were preoccupied with the ravages of
literary appropriation. the golden age of piracy captured the
nineteenth-century imagination, animating such best-selling novels
as Treasure Island and inspiring theatrical hits from The Pirates
of Penzance to Peter Pan. But the prevalence of unauthorized
reprinting and dramatic adaptation meant that authors lost immense
profits from the most lucrative markets. Infuriated, novelists and
playwrights denounced such literary piracy in essays, speeches, and
testimonies. Their fiction, however, tells a different story. Using
landmarks in copyright history as a backdrop, Pirating Fictions
argues that popular nineteenth-century pirate fiction,
mischievously resists the creation of intellectual property in
copyright legislation and law. Drawing on classic pirate stories by
such writers as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis
Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie, this wide-ranging account
demonstrates, in raucous tales and telling asides, how literary
appropriation was celebrated at the very moment when the forces of
possessive individualism began to enshrine the language of personal
ownership in Anglo-American views of creative work.
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