K.Bowrey, Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author, Routledge, 2020, 228 pp, hb, £36.99.

Kathy Bowrey's illuminating new book pursues a narrative that draws equally from legal history and literary chronicles of the late nineteenth and early-to mid-twentieth centuries.In so doing, the book makes a salient point: in the field of copyright law, there is no legal history without cultural history.The progress of this field of law has been determined by the way cultural products have been commodified via markets generated by emerging technologies, from the printing press to the gramophone, and from the cinema to Netflix.Legislative and judicial innovations have played an important role, but must be placed in this wider context.As Bowrey states, her task is to 'trace how the "culture industries" came to be perceived as "copyright industries" connected through the idea of authorship'(1).Early in the book, Bowrey sketches a pre-history of copyright law in the literary and dramatic fields, with a noteworthy analysis of John Milton's legal arrangements with his publisher, a member of the Stationers' Company.Milton's stationer appears to have recognised a form of literary property in Milton's poems, even prior to the first copyright legislation: The Statute of Anne 1710.Along with statutory copyright came the emergence of the English novel.Literary copyright disputes became more prevalent in the eighteenth century, with Samuel Richardson complaining about unauthorised editions and imitations of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1741).Moving to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bowrey opines that hero worship of novelists contributed to debates over legal reforms to copyright.That Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo advocated for an international authors' rights law is a well-known story in copyright lore.In her third chapter, Bowrey breaks new ground by turning her attention to the inventive English-language novelists who came in the wake of Dickens, pioneering the novelistic genres of crime, mystery and thriller, such as Hugh Conway (1847-1885), Fergus Hume (1859-1932) and Arthur Conan Doyle .In their lifetimes, these figures were viewed through the lens of the then prevalent 'great man theory of history', solidifying a narrative of the celebrity author as copyright evangelist.Bowrey relates that the burgeoning popularity of their detective stories and novels of intrigue crossed national boundaries.Eventually, with international recognition of copyright, post-Berne Convention (1886), such authors could benefit from lucrative global sales, as well as newly exploitable commercialisation and licensing revenues for dramatic adaptations.Bowrey's archival research is impressive -it imbues her study with analytical weight,

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