Comment by cafard

In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:

  By inhibiting cheap reprints of everything published after 1870, the Act helped reinforce a genteel impression that English literature itself had stopped about that date...