Book News: The lecture tour as a mover of modernism

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

BY ROBERT VOLPICELLI

Oxford University Press, 2021

ISBN: 9780192893383

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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 landscape 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—elite, popular, and everything in between. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

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."