Historians of literature and literary criticism have described a series of overlapping and complementary shifts in the conception, deployment and institutions of the literary during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and have outlined certain changes in ideas about authorship, genius, the canon, originality, artistic integrity and the autonomy of the poetic work. Or to put the point more strongly, critics have argued that authorship, genius, the canon and so on are produced as the foundations of aesthetic value, and indeed, that the institutionalisation of the aesthetic as an autonomous realm and as a value in and of itself is inaugurated during the Romantic period. Such transformations in poetic theory have been linked to the emergent conditions of publication at the end of the eighteenth century. These include technical developments in the printing and dissemination of books and other materials, changes in the copyright laws, the spread of literacy and the growth of a middle-class reading public, as well as factors such as the gendering of poetry audiences, the professionalisation of the writer and a decline in patronage, the increasing commercialisation of poetry, novels and other cultural artefacts, and the emergent discourses, as discrete disciplines, of economics, philosophy, literary criticism and aesthetics.