Brilliant Modernism

The flick of a switch and the flickering, still, of the candle; a city blazing with electricity and a moon whose poetic beams now looked differently natural. With a brightness of critical vision, Asciuto brings into focus a component of twentieth-century culture that was hiding in plain sight: the impact of lighting technologies on ways of poetic seeing. An illuminating book.

Brilliant Modernism is an original and convincing contribution to modernist studies. Like so many of the fascinating objects it brings into focus, the writing is sparky and sparkling; it's enlightening, too, in the extent to which it offers a new way of telling the history of modernist poetry at the interface of technological culture.

From moonlight to lamplight to electricity, Asciuto's study of light transfigures our understanding of spatiality in visual and literary productions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Offering a crucial intervention on studies of technology in modernism, Brilliant Modernism examines how light itself—at once hopeful and dreadful—shapes the modern mind.

An outstanding book and a significant contribution to the new wave of scholarly work on technology, modernism, and modernity. Asciuto takes her reader on a lively and compelling journey across cities (New York, Milan, Paris) and through a diverse range of modernist poetries. Bringing to light a compelling web of relations between technology, poetics, and cultural politics, this book shines with its own brilliance.