Prominent among the many controversies that have accompanied the rapid rise and spread of Generative AI, particularly large language model chatbots like ChatGPT, have been debates—philosophical as well as practical—concerning the relationship between language and ownership: to whom—or what—does linguistic production “belong”? Does an entity need to have attained “personhood” to have free speech rights under the First Amendment? While Amy Wong’s thoughtful study of representations of linguistic production in late Victorian fictions of empire appears just a split-second (so to speak) before the entrance of these issues upon the cultural stage, its historically grounded discussion of the emergence of kindred debates in the fin-de-siècle Anglosphere will strike readers as particularly timely today. Wong begins by proposing a foundational categorial distinction between “speech” and “talk,” with the former representing more an idea or ideology than an objective category of linguistic production: it is a “proprietary fantasy” whose investment in “a...

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