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34 Law & Literature 153 (2022)
Modernism and the Law

handle is hein.journals/lal34 and id is 152 raw text is: LAW & LITERATURE VOLUME 34 NUMBER 1 BOOK REVIEWS some of the more fruitful sections come when Mllers-here showing his juridical background-turns his attention to such questions as the status of international law and the ostensible value of human rights. Such analyses show that, despite some lingering conceptual questions, Mbllers has written an extremely rich book, combining a rarely seen analytic rigor with a truly immense range of reference. Anyone with an interest law, practical philosophy, social theory, or aesthetics will find much valuable analysis in its pages. Liam Egan Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Email: legan@princeton.edu © 2021 Liam Egan https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1981665 Modernism and the Law, by Robert Spoo, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, ISBN 978-1474275804, US$30.95, x + 196 pp. Pbk Bloomsbury's New Modernisms series consists of essential guides for serious students and scholars of modernism. Robert Spoo's superb contribution to the series amply fills this remit, offering readers an accessible survey of the literary history, recent scholarship, and current debates pertinent to its topic. But Modernism and the Law is something more as well: the first book-length attempt to characterize transatlantic modernism's relationship to law per se. Not, of course, to all laws. The book focuses on legal categories that regulated literary modernism's communications circuit, Robert Darnton's term for the path a work inscribes from author through intermediaries to readers. Spoo reminds us, however, that there are more intermediaries between author and reader than are dreamt of in our philosophy. To the obvious shortlist (editor, publisher, printer, and bookseller) he adds patron, blackmailer, censor, pirate, postal worker, cus- toms officer, vice crusader, lawyer, and judge. Being potentially so crowded, mod- ernism's communications circuit encompassed a wide set of legal areas, from copyright, free speech, and obscenity to questions of authorial reputation, priv- acy, and publicity. What's more, Spoo's handling of this set is careful enough that we trust him when he extrapolates from it to broader claims about modern- ism's transgressiveness, its bent for legal exceptionalism, and the belated recep- tion these tendencies could produce when they ran afoul of regulations. Scholars of modernism have not lacked monographs and edited volumes on their subject's relationship to particular areas of law.1 But these single-regime books necessarily underrepresent what Spoo calls modernism's congested legal 153

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