Volpicelli's book is a useful reminder to attend to such live moments [ literary lectures], 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, American Literary History * 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Modernist Studies Association First Book Award Committee * [ This] is a superbly researched book that brings previously unpublished materials to light while also adding a previously neglected medium of cultural transmission to the momentum behind the still incomplete transnational turn in modernist studies. I will be keen to see the many directions of further scholarship in this area that future scholars delve into, following Volpicelli's lead. * Zoe Rucker, International Yeats Studies * 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 *
