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Robert Spoo's new book, Modernism and the Law (2018), presents itself as "the first book to survey the legal contexts of transatlantic Anglo-American modernist culture." This it does admirably, as it ranges over a series of issues that it often shows to be related: obscenity and censorship; copyright, patronage and courtesy; and privacy, publicity, defamation, and blackmail, to list the book's three central chapters, which are bookended by chapters on Oscar Wilde and Ezra Pound.
Keywords: modernism / law / obscenity / copyright / patronage / blackmail
Robert Spoo, Modernism and the Law. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 208 pp. $88.00 hardcover.
Robert Spoos book Modernism and the Law follows on numerous publications since his turn into copyright law: his groundbreaking Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (Oxford UP, 2013), two shorter works, Copyright and Joyce. Litigating the Word: James Joyce in the Courts (James Joyce Centre, 2008), and Three Myths for Aging Copyrights: Tithonus, Dorian Gray, Ulysses (National Library of Ireland Joyce Studies Series, No. 6, 2004), as well as many law journal publications and law-related articles and essays. Spoos engagement with the issue of literature and the law has also been practically generative. His work as co-counsel with the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and other attorneys for Carol Shloss against the Estate of James Joyce led to the landmark decision to allow academics to use copyrighted materials in their writings. This latest work comes as a supplement to these earlier forays. It offers an overview of the evolving relation of legal attitudes to literary concerns, while adding new discussions of the legal lives of notable modernists, particularly Oscar Wilde and Ezra Pound.
The volume presents itself as "the first book to survey the legal contexts of transatlantic Anglo-American modernist culture" (back cover). This it does admirably, as it ranges over a series of issues that it often shows to be related: obscenity and censorship; copyright, patronage and courtesy; and privacy, publicity, defamation, and blackmail, to list the book's three central chapters, which are bookended by chapters on Wilde and Pound. Modernism and the Law thus spans some 150 years-from the 1868 case of Regina v. Hicklin, which offered a definition of obscenity that would be used successfully against Oscar Wilde...