Performance and Modernity

Julia A. Walker is Associate Professor of English and Drama, with joint appointments in the English and Performing Arts Departments at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voice, Words (Cambridge University Press, 2005), along with numerous published essays.

• 1. Money: Transacting Value on the Romantic Stage; 2. The Railroad: The Throughline to Modern Consciousness on the Naturalist Stage; 3. The Nation-State: Eurhythmics and the Bohemian Model of Affiliation; 4. Advertising: Avant-Garde Provocations and the Commercialization of Aesthetic Taste; 5. Air Conditioning: Psychological Realism and the Circulation of 'Cool'.

'This is a confident, intellectually rigorous, stimulating and innovative book. The perspectives it offers on the relationship between cultural innovation and performance practices, the space it opens for an embodied understanding of historical materials, and the claims it stages for the centrality of performance - not only to historical narrative, but to the process of historical change itself - will make it an important and influential addition to the Performance Studies canon. It deserves to find a wide and enthusiastic readership.' Sophie Nield, Royal Holloway, University of London