AUTHORSHIP AND APPROPRIATION: WRITING FOR THE STAGE IN By Paulina Kewes *VG+*

AUTHORSHIP AND APPROPRIATION: WRITING FOR THE STAGE IN By Paulina Kewes *VG+*

The book would have been graded Like New except for traces of water damage at some earlier point in its life. (See last photo).

The damage shows in the slight waviness of the lower half of the pages, that the dust jacket has been stuck down on its bottom of the rear flap, that the book is a bit canted and has trouble standing up by itself (again see photos).

On the positive side, there are no visible water stains, no musty odors, and no other signs of use or abuse including no dog ears, highlighting  bookplates, nor inscriptions.

The book will be wrapped and packed carefully and shipped US Media Mail with Tracking. If you buy more than one item, we are happy to consolidate and ship together to save substantially on postage costs. With Media Mail  each additional pound weight adds just 67 cents to the postage cost, the bargain of the 21st century.

From the flyleaf:

Authorship and Appropriation is the first full length study of the cultural and economic status of playwriting in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paulina Kewes argues that the period was decisive in the transition from Renaissance conceptions of authorship towards modern ones.

In Shakespeare's time, creative originality and independence of voice had been little prized. The appropriation of materials from earlier writings had rarely been censured, while the practice of collaboration among playwrights had been taken for granted.

Dr Kewes demonstrates that in the decades following the Restoration those attitudes were challenged by new conceptions of dramatic art.

Authors were now required to be the sole begetters of their works. Appropriation was seen as plagiarism, collaboration as evidence of creative insufficiency.

This book explores a series of developments in the theatrical marketplace which increased both the rewards and the literary prestige of the dramatist, and shows the Restoration period to have been one of serious and animated debate about the methods of playwriting.

Against that background, Dr Kewes offers a fresh account of the formation of the canon of English drama. She demonstrates that the moderns - Dryden, Otway, Lee, Behn, and then their successors Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar - acquired an esteem equal, even superior, to that of their illustrious predecessors Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher.

Paulina Kewes is Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth

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