Modernism and Copyright

How was modernism shaped, from its beginning, by intellectual property law? What role did the law’s imperial and transatlantic asymmetries play in modernism’s dissemination? How did various modernists exploit, reform, anoint, and evade copyright? And how is the study of modernism today being affected by expanding copyright regimes?

Modernism and Copyright is the first book to take up these questions. A truly multi-disciplinary study, it brings together essays by scholars of literature, theater, cinema, music, and law as well as by practicing lawyers and caretakers of modernist literary estates. Its contributors’ methods are as diverse as the works they discuss: Ezra Pound’s copyright statute and Charlie Parker’s bebop compositions feature here, as do early Chaplin films, EverQuest, and the Madison Avenue memo. As our portrait of modernism expands and fragments, Modernism and Copyright locates works such as these on one of the few landscapes they all clearly share: the uneven terrain of intellectual property law.

Paul K. Saint-Amour is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination.