E-raamat: Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

Winner, First Book Award, Modernist Studies Association Volpicelli's book opens up a new world of modernist literature: the celebrity circuit of early-twentieth-century lecture-tours. With a deft handling of materials and a strong voice, Volpicelli maneuvers the reader through this little-examined archive of modernism at its height, and its compromises with mass culture and celebrity that to us seem unimaginable. By so doing, Transatlantic Modernism and the U.S. Lecture Tour uncovers a distant world where poets, novelists, and literary critics enjoyed a mainstream national following - and the lecture format served as mass entertainment and ersatz adult education * Modernist Studies Association First Book Award Committee * Volpicelli's book is a useful reminder to attend to literary lectures as live moments, and a reminder too that we still need to ask questions about where and how modernism happened. In Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour, we see it happen (fleetingly) as the author's breath and voice sound out through air that's shared. We are all now probably especially ready to recognize the specificity of those circumstances, and their peculiar power to shape experience, emotion, and thought * Emily Coit, author of American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture, and the Genteel Tradition * Documenting the movement of the lecture form from the lyceum stage to the halls of academia, this study complements and complicates Mark McGurl's frequently cited book, The Program Era (2009), to show an evolution of modernism (and modernists) as popular product. It offers new insights on racialization and nationalism in its readings of Wilde, Yeats, and Tagore, and writes modernism as a shadow story about the technology of transportation. The prose is a pleasure to read throughout, and like a good public lecture, the book is as enjoyable as it is edifying. * Anna Teekell, Modernism/modernity *