Review: Brad Evans, Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)

Abstract

As the subtitle of Brad Evans’s Ephemeral Bibelots provocatively suggests, this is a book about some long-obscured origins of American Modernism, about the relationship between the American and the international, and about the faddishness of fin-de-siècle ephemeral bibelots that largely have been ignored in studies of the period. As such, this book deepens our understanding of modern periodical studies and of long Modernism as it recovers a transformative print-cultural moment.