PERSON
Martha Woodmansee
The literary scholar who spent four decades proving that the Romantic myth of individual authorship was invented in the eighteenth century to serve market interests—a discovery that reframes every question about AI, creativity, and copyright.
Martha Woodmansee is the historian of a construction so successful it forgot it was one. For a thousand years Western culture understood writing as compilation, transmission, and skillful arrangement of inherited materials; the idea that a text expresses something uniquely individual, and that the individual therefore owns it, was built in the late eighteenth century under the specific economic pressures of a collapsing patronage system. Writers needed property rights;
the Romantic authorship construct gave them a philosophical justification dressed as an aesthetic fact. Woodmansee, over four decades at Case Western Reserve University, assembled the primary-source evidence for this argument with a precision that makes it hard to dismiss as theory. Her landmark 1984 essay traced the concept of original genius directly to German copyright disputes; her 1992 essay recovered the
compilation tradition that genius ideology had displaced; her co-edited volume with Peter Jaszi,
The Construction of Authorship (1994), brought legal scholars and literary scholars into the same argument for the first time.