By Sundeep Bisla
In the works and letters of his later years, Wilkie Collins
continually expressed his displeasure over copyright violations. Wilkie Collins and Copyright: Artistic
Ownership in the Age of the Borderless Word by Sundeep Bisla asks
whether that discontent might not also have affected the composition of
Collins’s major early works of the 1850s and 60s. Bisla’s investigation into
this question, surprisingly, does not find an uncomplicated author
uncomplicatedly launched on a defense of what he believes to be rightfully his.
Instead, Bisla finds an author locked in fierce negotiation with the
theoretical underpinnings of his medium, the written word, underpinnings best delineated
by the twentieth-century deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Collins’s
discomfort with copyright violation comes to be in tension with his budding
understanding of the paradoxical nature of the “iterability” of the word, a
nature presenting itself as a conflict between the settling and breaking
manifestations of linguistic repetition. In his efforts at resolving this
paradox, Collins adopts a mechanism of recursive self-reflexivity through which
each story reflects upon itself to a more fundamental extent than had its
predecessor. This self-reflexive exploration has significant consequences for
the author’s own iterability-menaced subjectivity, a striking example of which
can be seen in the fact that the name being sought in Collins’s last masterpiece, The
Moonstone, will end up being “MY OWN NAME”—in other words, “WILKIE COLLINS.”
“Wilkie Collins and Copyright is an elegant, intelligent, and impressive work. It is certain to be considered an important, perhaps even classic, Collins study. Sundeep Bisla is an impeccable researcher and beautiful writer. He provides a fresh interpretation of Collins as a novelist whose highly self-conscious efforts to manipulate language are set against the background of the particular material conditions for Victorian authorship, especially those governing copyright.” —Lauren M. E. Goodlad, author of The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty and Transnational Experience.
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