Book

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour (Oxford UP, 2021)

Winner of the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize
Now available in paperback

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.

Key Features

  • First comprehensive study of modernist authors on the US lecture tour
  • Features a wide range of archival research, including previously unpublished lectures and tour ephemera
  • Provides new readings of well-known modernists
  • Advances theories of literary sociology

Praise for Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

“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 US 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 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

“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

“[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

Available for Purchase:
Oxford UP (UK)
Oxford UP (US)
Barnes & Noble
Bookshop.org
Waterstones