venuti

Dissidence 165licensed by Harriet Beecher Stowe did not infringe her copyright forthe English-language text (Kaplan 1967:29). Although Englandinstituted the first important copyright statute at the beginning of theeighteenth century, in 1851, the year of Shelley’s death, English lawdid not give the author translation rights. It was not until 1852 thatthe right of authors to license translations of their published texts wasrecognized by statute, which limited it to five years from the date ofpublication (Sterling and Carpenter 1986:103). A general copyrightlaw was not formulated in Italy until the Unification: on 25 June 1865,four days after Tarchetti published the first installment of histranslation as his tale, the Italian government gave authors the rightto “publish, reproduce, and translate” their texts, although thetranslation rights were limited to ten years from the date ofpublication (Piola-Caselli 1927:22, 24, 26).Tarchetti’s plagiarism was not so much copyright infringementas a violation of the individualistic notion of authorship on whichcopyright is based. As Martha Woodmansee shows, copyrightlaws recognize the writer’s ownership of a text insofar as he is itsauthor or originator—“that is, insofar as his work is new andoriginal, an intellectual creation which owes its individualitysolely and exclusively to him” (Woodmansee 1984:446). Thisnotion of authorship assumes romantic expressive theory: the textis seen as expressing the unique thoughts and feelings of thewriter, a free, unified consciousness which is not divided bydeterminations that exceed and possibly conflict with hisintention. The author is assigned the sole and exclusive copyrightbecause his subjectivity is taken to be a metaphysical essencewhich is present in his text and all its copies, but whichtranscends any difference or change introduced by formaldeterminations, like printing and binding, language and genre,and by economic and political conditions, like the publishingindustry and government censorship. The very idea of authorialcopyright, however, confesses the possibility of change because itis designed to control the form and marketing of the book bylicensing reproduction and repressing change that is notauthorized. Copyright opens up a contradiction in theindividualistic notion of authorship by demonstrating that suchlaw is suspended between metaphysics and materialism,acknowledging the material contingencies of form, the possibilityof its difference from the author, but enacting its transparencywith the metaphysical assumption of authorial presence.