Book launch: 'Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry'
Event details
Please join us for an evening celebrating the recent publication of Dr Nicoletta Asciuto’s monograph, Brilliant Modernism Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry. The event will consist of a short presentation and a conversation with Dr Boriana Alexandrova, author of Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading, followed by a wine reception.
About the book:
In Brilliant Modernism, Nicoletta Asciuto takes readers on a journey through the electrified streets of the early twentieth century and explores the influence of this illumination on modernist poetry. This ambitious and geographically wide-ranging account of how poets responded to the changing cityscape is distinctive in its historicist approach and the enormous scope of the materials it examines, from Mina Loy's lamps for the modern home to lunar photography.
As the glow of gas lamps gave way to the piercing beams of the new era, poets navigated a world where light dictated social standing, gender roles, and the very rhythm of life. Brilliant Modernism is a story of contrasts - the starkness of electric light against the softness of the moon, the traditional against the modern, and the male-dominated world against the rising tide of female empowerment. Asciuto reworks our understanding of the modernist moment, reimagining the influence of figures such as T. S. Eliot, Lola Ridge, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Rosa Rosà.
Set against the backdrop of a world on the brink of massive changes, this book shines a light on forgotten women poets and artists whose contributions to the modernist movement have long been overshadowed by their male counterparts. Through a narrative that is as much about the aesthetics of light as it is about the poets themselves, Asciuto illuminates the vibrant and often volatile intersection of technology and culture.
This is an in-person event but it will also be made available to those who wish to attend online via Zoom:
https://york-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93989325393?pwd=4UbGH6J6yRb8bZFOWst7E5s9Fxhe27.1
Meeting ID: 939 8932 5393
Passcode: 460916
About the speaker
Dr Nicoletta Asciuto is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of York. Her most recent publications include a cluster for Modernism/modernity, entitled “Modernist Periodical Studies and the Transnational Turn” (2023), and her monograph Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press 2025). She has published various articles on modernist poetry, especially on T. S. Eliot. She is co-investigator for York on a project funded by the European Commission, “EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective.” Nicoletta has also published literary translations, the latest of which feature in Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations, edited by Emilie Morin (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Her Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris. A Poem (1920), the first translation of Mirrlees’s work into Italian, is forthcoming in March 2025 with Interno Poesia.