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.