"In Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups, Candace Spigelman investigates the dynamics of ownership in small group writing workshops, basing her findings on case studies involving two groups: a five-member creative writing group meeting monthly at a local Philadelphia coffee bar and a four-member college-level writing group meeting in their composition classroom. She explores the relationship between particular notions of intellectual property within each group as well as the effectiveness of writing groups that embrace these notions. Addressing the negotiations between the public and private domains or writing within these groups, she discovers that for both the committed writers and the novices, "values associated with textual ownership play a crucial role in writing group performance.""--Jacket.