Wilkie Collins and copyright : artistic ownership in the age of the borderless word /

Bisla's book focuses on questions of ownership, piracy of British texts in the US, and the ways legal and cultural controversies can shed light on Wilkie Collins's novels of the 1850s-60s. The readings of key scenes from The Woman in White and The Moonstone are brilliant: Bisla (York College, CUNY) reexamines the texts with a full understanding both of the critical discourse around them and of the fraught discussions of piracy and dissemination of texts. The discussion of legal cases and debates about the standing of the author and the implications of replication of the text through publishing are fascinating in themselves. The author reads Collins's deploying of doubles in the novels not as exploring psychological problems but as gestures toward the issues textual reproduction raises. Bisla's ambitious pairing of new historicist and deconstructive ideas, especially his use of Derrida's ideas about the fracturing of written language, fuel his insistence on the power of theory to unleash the importance of what he calls "the breaking function" in Collins's work. The sophistication of thought here is impressive, but it also means that only those familiar with Collins's work and with deconstruction will truly benefit from the book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers/faculty. S. Bernardo Wagner College