Modernism & the Law

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 authors accused of obscenity. Spoo proposes that Wilde's many embroilments in disputes about defamation, blackmail, copyright, censorship, privacy, and obscenity "made him a precursor of modernism's legally embattled posture."

Most of Spoo's case studies take a "law of literature" approach to demonstrate how legal entities and mechanisms regulated literary production and determined the conditions for literary dissemination. In short, the main question Spoo poses in his case studies is this: how have regulatory contexts shaped Anglo-American modernist literary culture? As Spoo explains, during the modern period, literary culture became "congested" by an increasing network of regulations (including libel, obscenity, and copyright laws) that often stifled and sometimes enabled production and access to literature in multiple and surprising ways. Moreover, this regulatory context has, in turn, influenced our own understanding of a number of modernist literary texts.

For example, when vice societies, purity groups, and circulating libraries sought to suppress or destroy literature they viewed as indecent, authors, editors, and printers began to exercise increased self-censorship. In chapter two, Spoo outlines the rousing debate among modernist scholars about how and to what extent this informal system of suppression also and more interestingly gave rise to an aesthetic of impenetrability and techniques of indirection, irony, and fragmentation, especially in Joyce and Woolf. In this same chapter, Spoo goes on to survey the ways that official mechanisms of censorship converged with these informal forces to target an expanding array of authors and businesses (in personam proceedings) as well as books (in rem proceedings) and how in the United States these official mechanisms operated according to a multijurisdictional patchwork of regulations. What emerges from the welter of laws and cases is positively byzantine, but for Spoo what matters most is how the onslaught of shifting and vaguely worded legal standards and geographically specific sanctions affected "serious" literary culture. Modernism and the Law delves into actions against The Rainbow, The Well of Loneliness, and, of course, Ulysses. Meanwhile, as Spoo shows, the escalating conflict between censors and authors led to such concepts as the "modern classic" and "the private edition." The legal scholar in Spoo almost seems to regret that "erotic modernism" was denied...