In publishing Paul Saint-Amour’s edited collection Modernism and Copyright
in 2011 (which includes an early version of chapter 3 of this book), we hoped
to set the stage for a more thorough and sophisticated conversation about
the role intellectual property issues played in the construction of modernism.
Further, we believed that the Modernist Literature & Culture series might be
an att ractive venue for the kind of vibrant work on IP modernism sketched
out in that volume. (Indeed, the series had already tapped into new work in
law and modern literature with Sean Latham’s Th e Art of Scandal in 2009.)
In the back of our minds, we also knew that Robert Spoo was at work on an
important study of the topic, work that reached back into the nineteenthcentury
tradition of “trade courtesy” and bore the impress of his careful legal
scholarship; for many of us, the earliest inkling of this work came with the
1998 publication of his Yale Law Journal article “Copyright Protectionism
and Its Discontents: Th e Case of James Joyce’s Ulysses in America.”