In 'The Crypt, the Haunted House of Cinema', Cholodenko argues that film is, metaphorically speaking, a haunted house: an instance of the uncanny. This raises the possibility the film script is also uncanny, from the Freudian notion of das Unheimliche, the strangely familiar and familiarly strange - and thus also a haunted house. This proposition engenders a search as self-reflexive practice for that which haunts the script' an uncanny process to explore the uncanny. The search requires drawing on Barthes, acting 'as dead' with that process' attendant contradictions and problematics' the most likely ghost in the script being the writing self. Establishing the characteristics of the writing self involves distinguishing that figure from the author. This requires outlining the development of theories of the author from the concept of authorial will, as per the argument of Hirsch, to the abnegation of the author as a philosophical certainty. Barthes and Foucault call this abnegation the death of the author. Rather than that marking the end of a particular branch of analysis, the death of the author can be considered an opening to the writing practice. From this perspective, the death of the author becomes a strategy in Foucault's game of writing, effecting the obfuscation of the writing self, by placing a figure as dead, the author figure, within the metaphorical topography of the text. Indeed, the author as dead is akin to a character in the narrative but at a substratum level of the text. What places this dead figure within the text is an uncanny writing self, a figure of transgression, brought into being in the experience of Blanchot's essential solitude. 'The Seaborne' written by Matt Marshall, provides an example of a film script that constitutes a haunted house, a site of the uncanny. In terms of the generic characteristics of the film script as text type, its relative unimportance in relation to any subsequent film based on the script becomes of itself a feature of the film script. This makes the film script a site of negotiation and contestation between the implied author as hidden director on the one hand and the implied reader as implied director on the other. This confirms the film script as, using Sternberg's terminology, a blueprint text type. Examples of the negotiation and relationship between hidden director and implied director are found in analysis of 'The Seaborne' as are the tensions in the relationship between the individualistic impulses of the hidden director and the mechanistic, formal requirements of the text type as blueprint. These tensions are ameliorated by the hidden director who is then effaced within the constructed layers of the film script text to allow interpretive space for the implied director. 'The Seaborne' as representative of the film script text becomes the after-image of a written text and the foreshadowing of a future filmic one. It therefore never finds completion within its own construction process and its formation begins in templates that accord with the Bakhtin's description of the epic, as is shown by comparing the construction notes for 'The Seaborne' with Aristotlean dramatic requirements. But at the same time there is present in 'The Seaborne' a Bakhtinian dialogism that points towards the individual markers of a writing self. This writing self, referring to Kristeva, is a figure of abjection. It transgresses itself and transgresses its own transgressions. It is a ghost in a ghost story without ghosts.

The first rule of writing is an important one: writers should not plagiarize; what they write should be their own. It is taken for granted. But who made the rule? Why? And how is it enforced? This dissertation traces the history of proprietary authorship from the earliest distinctions between imitation and misappropriation in the humanist schoolroom, through the first recorded uses in English of the Latin legal term plagiary (kidnapper) as a metaphor for literary misappropriation, to an inchoate conception of literary property among a coterie of writers in early modern England. It argues that the recognition of literary misappropriation emerged as a result of the instrumental reading habits of early humanist scholars and that the subsequent distinction between authors and plagiarists depended more upon the maturity of the writer than has been previously recognized. Accusations of plagiarism were a means of discrediting a rival, although in this capacity their import also depended largely upon one’s perspective. In the absence of established trade customs, writers had to subscribe to the proprieties of the institutions with which they were affiliated. They were deemed plagiarists only when their actions were found to be out of place. These proprieties not only informed early modern definitions of plagiarism; they also helped define the perimeters of proprietary authorship. Authors who wished to make a fair profit from labours in print had to conform to the regulations of the Stationer’s Company, just as authors who maintained a proprietary interest in their manuscripts had to draw upon legal rhetoric, such as plagiary, in the absence of a legally recognized notion of authorial property. With new information technologies expanding the boundaries of proprietary authorship everyday, the proprieties according to which these boundaries were first defined should help teachers and researchers not only better to understand the nature of Renaissance authorship but also to equip their students for the future.

The first rule of writing is an important one: writers should not plagiarize; what they write should be their own. It is taken for granted. But who made the rule? Why? And how is it enforced? This dissertation traces the history of proprietary authorship from the earliest distinctions between imitation and misappropriation in the humanist schoolroom, through the first recorded uses in English of the Latin legal term plagiary (kidnapper) as a metaphor for literary misappropriation, to an inchoate conception of literary property among a coterie of writers in early modern England. It argues that the recognition of literary misappropriation emerged as a result of the instrumental reading habits of early humanist scholars and that the subsequent distinction between authors and plagiarists depended more upon the maturity of the writer than has been previously recognized. Accusations of plagiarism were a means of discrediting a rival, although in this capacity their import also depended largely upon one’s perspective. In the absence of established trade customs, writers had to subscribe to the proprieties of the institutions with which they were affiliated. They were deemed plagiarists only when their actions were found to be out of place. These proprieties not only informed early modern definitions of plagiarism; they also helped define the perimeters of proprietary authorship. Authors who wished to make a fair profit from labours in print had to conform to the regulations of the Stationer’s Company, just as authors who maintained a proprietary interest in their manuscripts had to draw upon legal rhetoric, such as plagiary, in the absence of a legally recognized notion of authorial property. With new information technologies expanding the boundaries of proprietary authorship everyday, the proprieties according to which these boundaries were first defined should help teachers and researchers not only better to understand the nature of Renaissance authorship but also to equip their students for the future.