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Robert Spoo. Modernism and the Law. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. 196 pp. Cloth $88.00 Paper $29.95
ROBERT SPOO'S BOOK is part of Bloomsbury's New Modernisms series, edited by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers. Other titles focus on a wide range of subjects including print cultures, science and technology, war and violence, the global context, and sex and gender. Each one seeks to strike the tricky balance between accessibility and scholarly rigor. The premise behind the series is that master narratives about modernism are themselves perpetually up for grabs, and we would do well to dispense with them and organize our debates about the field according to interdisciplinary thematic categories and "new engagements" instead of chronology and old hierarchies.
Thanks to this mandate, Spoo is liberated to plunge directly into his subject without the prolonged, sometimes tortured theoretical and methodological positioning that characterizes much law and humanities scholarship. Although he addresses himself to an audience of readers trained in literary studies, he defends his recourse to a technical legal vocabulary as essential to the "stereoscopic interdisciplinarity" he practices. Fortunately, he writes as clearly and engagingly about law as he does about literature.
Modernism and the Law offers a series of case studies of transatlantic late-Victorian and modernist authors (Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and others) whose life and work intersects with "clusters" of legal doctrines and landmark trials. Modernism and the Law opens with an extended analysis of Wilde's legal travails. Spoo narrates Wilde's ill-fated criminal libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry as well as the Crown's corresponding prosecution of Wilde for gross indecency. He uses these notorious trials to dramatize the significance of the Victorian legal context for making sense of modernist literary culture. As he points out, the same concerns about "posing" that characterized these trials reemerge in rhetoric aimed at modernist...