There was, in the nineteenth century, a distinction made between "writers" and "authors," Susan S. Williams notes, the former defined as those who composed primarily from mere experience or observation rather than from the unique genius or imagination of the latter. If women were more often cast as writers than authors by the literary establishment, there also emerged in magazines, advice books, fictional accounts, and letters a specific model of female authorship, one that valorized "natural" feminine traits such as observation and emphasis on detail, while also representing the distance between amateur writing and professional authorship. Attending to biographical and cultural contexts and offering fresh readings of literary works, Reclaiming Authorship focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put this model of female authorship into practice. Williams shows how it sometimes intersected with prevailing notions of male authorship and sometimes diverged from them, and how it is often precisely those moments of divergence when authorship was reclaimed by women. The current trend to examine "women writers" rather than "authors" marks a full rotation of the circle, and "writers" can indeed be the more capacious term, embracing producers of everything from letters and diaries to published books. Yet certain nineteenth-century women made particular efforts to claim the title "author," Williams demonstrates, and we miss something of significance by ignoring their efforts.

The recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. In Reclaiming the Author, Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction. By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors--Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa--Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as Rayuela, Terra nostra, and El hablador, call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles.

In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when some permissions “i” proves undottable. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi chart a clear path through the confusion by urging a robust embrace of a principle long-embedded in copyright law, but too often poorly understood—fair use. By challenging the widely held notion that current copyright law has become unworkable and obsolete in the era of digital technologies, Reclaiming Fair Use promises to reshape the debate in both scholarly circles and the creative community. This indispensable guide distills the authors’ years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals into no-nonsense advice and practical examples for content producers. Reclaiming Fair Use begins by surveying the landscape of contemporary copyright law—and the dampening effect it can have on creativity—before laying out how the fair-use principle can be employed to avoid copyright violation. Finally, Aufderheide and Jaszi summarize their work with artists and professional groups to develop best practice documents for fair use and discuss fair use in an international context. Appendixes address common myths about fair use and provide a template for creating the reader’s own best practices. Reclaiming Fair Use will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the law, creativity, and the ever-broadening realm of new media.

Whitmore and Meyer bring together top literacy scholars from around the world to introduce the concept of manifestations: evidence of meaning making in literacy events, practices, processes, products, and thinking. Manifestation are windows into literacy identities, and serve as affective and sociocultural signifiers of learners’ understanding at a point in time and in a specific context. The volume reclaims progressive spaces for understanding reading, writing, drawing, speaking, playing, and other literacies. It grounds manifestations of literacies in the discourse of meaning making and demonstrates how literacy learners and educators are active agents in this complex, social, political, emotional, and multimodal process. Ideal for preservice teachers, graduate students, and researchers in literacy education, this book shifts the conversation away from treating literacies as acquired commodities and illustrates how educators engage with learners to deepen understanding of literacy learners’ experiences. Organized by five pillars of literacy—teaching, learning, language, curriculum, and sociocultural contexts—each section covers critical and cutting-edge topics and offers examples, tools, and strategies for research and practical applications in diverse classroom settings. Each chapter includes a range of examples and is followed by a short, complementary reading extension to engage the reader.

This volume explores a dimension of authorship not given its due in the critical discourse to this point—authorship contested. Much of the existing critical literature begins with a text and the proposition that the text has an author. The debates move from here to questions about who the author is, whether or not the author’s identity is even relevant, and what relationship she or he does and does not have to the text. The authors contributing to this collection, however, ask about circumstances surrounding efforts to prevent authors from even being allowed to have these questions asked of them, from even being identified as authors. They ask about the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances that motivate a prospective audience to resist an author’s efforts to have a text published, read, and discussed. Particularly noteworthy is the range of everyday rhetorical situations in which contesting authorship occurs—from the production of a corporate document to the publication of fan fiction. Each chapter also focuses on particular instances in which authorship has been contested, demonstrating how theories about various forms of contested authorship play out in a range of events, from the complex issues surrounding peer review to authorship in the age of intelligent machines.

Drawing on the rhetorical work of James Phelan, Wayne Booth's ethical criticism, recent work on William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as an understanding of the role of skepticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English thought, Thackeray's Skeptical Narrative and the "Perilous Trade" of Authorship makes a substantial contribution to nineteenth-century reading practices, as well as narratology in general. Judith Fisher combines in this study rhetorical and ethical analysis of Thackeray's narrative techniques to trace how his fiction develops to educate his reader into what she terms a "hermeneutic of skepticism." This is a kind of poised reading which enables his readers to integrate his fiction into their life in what Thackeray called "a world without God" without becoming pessimistic or fatalistic. Although Thackeray's narrative strategies have been the subject of study, most have focused on Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond only, and none look as closely as does this study at actual rhetorical techniques such as his use of pronominalization to interpolate the reader into his skeptical discourse. Fisher also brings her analysis to bear on The Adventures of Philip and The Virginians, Thackeray's last two complete novels, both of which were critical failures even as contemporary critics acknowledged their stylistic excellence. This is the first study to attempt to understand the puzzle of those two books; Fisher recovers them from their marginalized position in Thackeray's oeuvre. Fisher expertly weaves an accessible narrative theory with thoroughgoing knowledge of Thackeray's life in an integrated reading of his entire works. Reading Thackeray holistically in spite of his own disruptive practices, she does full justice to his critical skepticism while elucidating his canon for a new readership.

Reclaiming Fair Use begins by surveying the landscape of contemporary copyright law--and the dampening effect it can have on creativity--before laying out how the fair-use principle can be employed to avoid copyright violation. Finally, Aufderheide and Jaszi summarize their work with artists and professional groups to develop best practice documents for fair use and discuss fair use in an international context. Appendixes address common myths about fair use and provide a template for creating the reader's own best practices. --From publisher description.