Illuminates how the power of light shaped early twentieth-century art, culture, and poetry.
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
