Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
157. "the 'new rhetoric of authorship' lunsford envisions may not be entirely new"; "dispite a historical context different from our own, these 'alternative forms' [exemplifed below] offer some strategies for what i call distributed authorship, a view of shared textual ownership adaptable to today's writing and publication circumstances"
158-9. writers of child-rearing & teaching texts--usually women esp. as the genre developed as a woman's genres--"[their] own self-representations as motherly teachers offer a highly self-conscious consideration of authorship--one interested both in claiming a distinctive role for women as authors and in casting their intellectual work as done for the common good"
160. gendered ideologies in practice? "(male) book publishers in the antebellum united states...had a vested interest in a loose, transportable ownership of barbauld's text, whereas lady editors tended to have a firmer committment to guarding the integrity of (at least some of) her writerly authority"
163. ownership is so prioritized today a website accepting submissions from young authors warns all submittors that *everything* they submit--advice, ideas, questions, works, etc.--"becomes the property of [the site] and cannot be returned": "the web site itself, it seems, becomes both publication space and author."
164-5. the unnamed female editor/re-framer of barbauld's text "helped lay some groundwork for what we today might term a strong assertion of intellectual property rights of the first author over her text. significantly, however, this introduction also suggested a gendered variation on that view of authorial ownership--one allowing for empathetic sharing between the woman writer and her female reader(s). this vision of colective authorship also imagined shared circulation capabilities, though not composition credit, based on a gender-specific ability to access the text"; thus "ownership of the lessons was cast as communal, grounded in a common gender identity and related social role, even though credit for its efficacy was still assigned to the original author"; work modern authors & lawyers are doing to create & apply "creative commons" licensing, "open to use by the public" text, & shareware on the web makes--or at least searches for ways of making--similar moves.
166. pierpont's editorial decision-making & rights-assertion (to not just "copy" but "to alter") as exemplary of a then-developing trend in "american curriculum writing that is well worth noting--a tendency to construct the 'textbook' as acquiring authority through its affiliation with a corporate author function that elides the personal identity of particular writers, and, by extension, discourages individual teachers from rewriting those texts to meet context-specific needs"; other consequences: "since his compilation failed to identify sources for his borrowed entries, which are actually culled from numerous sources, we cannot easily uncover disjunctions between his versions and the originals. his weak sense of others' authorship as a locus of control over textual integrity denied even his original readers the kind of ownership over meaning that a cursory reading of his preface would suggest they have.
167. comparisons w/web publishing: "today, with digital texts paralleling the earlier era's print explosion, we might want at least to consider following the lead of the lessons' early lady editor and her nineteenth-century discendents in maintaining authorial credit-giving even when we want to affirm more communal rights over the interpretation and circulation management of texts"; these is, after all, all this to think about: "to what extent do the social benefits of 'free' use of such fluid texts [as web publications] outweigh the problems of not being able to track where and how layers of change have occurred? are conventions for signaling such layers--in hypertextual environments, for example---developable? reliable? enforceable? desirable? with these questions in mind, we might consider the possibility of distinguishing more carefully between intellectual property issues related to attribution, textual integrity, and (collective) textual reconfigurations, on the one hand, and those related more directly to monetary compensation, on the other" (emphasis added)
168. "an extreme application of 'free use' can actually elide aspects of the social writing process behind a particular text. for instance, when packagers like pierpont and his heirs appropriated barbauldian texts without assigning credit, they began a suppression process that eventually allowed for words and thoughts which had been produced by multiple collaborators in a particular material context to be recirculated in ways that erased that context. such moves, over time, suppressed not only the individual agency of barbauld as 'author' but also the larger, ongoing contributions of many women writers to particular genres and teaching practices, thus eliding their influence on important cultural work"; "so we may need to develop more sophisticated models for recording our patterns of appropriation," "and we should try to teach practices that create a record of the meaningful, materially situated links between our writing and its sources, not because others we 'credit' with conventions like footnotes are the sole owners of their texts, but rather to show how they have shared their work with us"
169. "if we truly want to affirm a belief in the social aspects of all writing, while promoting informed critique of authorship in various contexts, we should resist either extreme characterization of the hypothetical student's writing process and instead acknowledge the complexity inherent in all collaborations (both ethical and problematic).