Awards

• Winner of Winner, First Book Award, Modernist Studies Association.

Overview

Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person-through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour.Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural and historical scope to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience; Lelite, popular, and everything in between

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9780198914792

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Reviews

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 *

Author Information

Robert Volpicelli is an Assistant Professor of English at Randolph-Macon College where he specializes in transnational modernisms and modern poetry. His essays on modernist literature and culture have appeared in such journals as Textual Practice, NOVEL, and Twentieth-Century Literature, among others. He also co-edited a recent issue of College Literature on the topic of ""Poetry Networks.""

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