Joyce and The Law ed. by Jonathan Goldman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Joyce and The Law ed. by Jonathan Goldman Thomas F. Cotter (bio) JOYCE AND THE LAW, edited by Jonathan Goldman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. x + 294 pp. $84.95. Since it first emerged from within the legal academy some forty years ago, the law and literature movement has enriched the study of both literature and law in many ways: for example, by examining the many similarities (as well as differences) in the ways that readers and critics use and interpret literary and legal texts; by illuminating the literary presentation of legal themes, as well as the real-world legal backdrop against which fictional events take place; and by focusing attention on how the law affects the content and distribution of literary works themselves, most notably through issues relating to intellectual property, defamation, and obscenity. As an intellectual-property-law scholar with a lifelong interest in the works of James Joyce, I was therefore happy to see how a recent edited volume from the Florida James Joyce Series, Joyce and the Law, illustrates these currents coming together in Joyce's writing, ranging all the way from the little-read Exiles to Finnegans Wake. Authored by fifteen leading Joyce scholars, the essays making up the volume cast light on, among other things, Joyce's (occasional) use of legal subject matter as source material, inspiration, or theme; the manner in which the legal regimes governing early-twentieth-century Ireland would have shaped and constrained his characters' conduct and opportunities; and the way law, especially copyright and obscenity law, has affected the publication and use of Joyce's work over the years. Perhaps more importantly, though, the volume leads me to draw two other, less obvious connections or parallels between law and literature. The first relates to the ways in which both law (and other social norms) and literature (and other arts) are always engaged in a fundamental struggle to find the "right," if only temporary, accommodation between freedom and constraint. The second, perhaps not altogether distinct from the first, is how both literature and law can be understood as experiments or works-in-progress: simultaneously the product of human effort to engage with a specific time, place, and culture, as well as part of the raw materials by which that culture constantly revises itself, in a never-ending cycle of mutuality and response. In the following paragraphs, I will first briefly describe the individual essays, some in more detail than others, before sketching out their relation to these broader points. Following an introductory chapter by editor Jonathan Goldman introducing the collection, the individual contributions are arranged [End Page 213] into four parts: "Legal Lives of Joyce's Characters," "Legal Regimes of Joyce's Spaces and Places," "Joyce's Legal Languages and Sources," and "Circulation and Its Legalities." The first two of these analyze the ways in which various bodies of law either would have impacted the lives of Joyce's characters or, in fact, affected Joyce's selection and treatment of certain topics. Janine Utell's essay "Criminal Conversation: Marriage, Adultery, and the Law in Joyce's Work," for example, shows how early-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish regulation of sex and marriage would have shaped the circumstances confronting, and the (dis)satisfaction experienced by, characters including Exiles's Richard Rowan, several of the inhabitants of Dubliners, and (as they test the boundaries of their infidelities) both Leopold and Molly Bloom. Carey Mickalites's "Joyce and British Finance Law: Adrift on the Waters of International Investment" focuses on, among other things, how an understanding of England's ineffective regulation of securities fraud enriches a reading of "After the Race," while Steven Morrison's "Joyce, the Aliens Act, and Immigration" meditates on the way late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates on immigration and nationality would have informed the often bigoted sentiments expressed by characters throughout the works concerning Jews and Italians (whose actual numbers in Dublin circa 1904 nonetheless were quite small). Following this, in "National Languages and Neutral Idioms: Joyce Among the Language Laws," Tekla Mecsnóber discusses how debates over European linguistic policies in the aftermath of World War I, and efforts to advance the usage of artificial...