Ebook: Modernism and the Law

Exploring critical legal issues and cases of the period—from Oscar Wilde’s prosecution for gross indecency to legal bans on such publications as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and James Joyce’s Ulysses—Modernism and the Law is the first book to survey the legal contexts of transatlantic Anglo-American modernist culture. Written by one of the leading authorities on the subject, the book covers such topics as:
• Obscenity laws and censorship
• Copyrights, moral rights, and the public domain
• Patronage and literary piracy
• Privacy, defamation, publicity, and blackmail
Including an annotated list of relevant statutes, treaties, and cases, this is an essential read for scholars and students coming to the subject for the first time as well as for experienced scholars.
This book offers a concise account of law as it shaped transatlantic literary modernism. It surveys the ways in which legal and extralegal mechanisms—statutes, courts, prosecutors, purity groups—shaped and sometimes deformed modern Anglo-American literary production and dissemination. The volume also explores ways in which literary texts represented the forces of law by reimagining the effects of regulation. The study begins with Oscar Wilde’s encounters with the laws that would later impact modernism—copyright, obscenity, defamation, blackmail, privacy—and ends with Ezra Pound’s fierce struggles with copyright, obscenity, books tariffs, and passports. Wilde’s and Pound’s incarcerations and their indictments for gross indecency and treason, respectively, frame this survey. Other chapters cover obscenity and censorship; copyright and patronage; and blackmail, defamation, privacy, and publicity. Subjects include the rise and fall of the strict Hicklin test, which suppressed controversial books in the interests of protecting young persons, and the patchwork regulation of obscenity in America and the growth of free-speech standards. Discussions of copyright show the stark asymmetry of authors’ protections in the transatlantic setting, and probe copyright, patronage, and trade-courtesy protections for authors’ works. An overview of reputational laws explores blackmail, defamation, privacy, and publicity in works by Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle and in litigation brought by James Joyce against the pirate-pornographer Samuel Roth. The book discusses many authors, including T.S. Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, as well as lawyers and judges such as Morris Ernst, Learned and Augustus Hand, John Quinn, and John Woolsey.