| Description |
[vii], 360 pages, 2 unnumbered pages of plates ; 25 cm |
| Contents |
Pt. I. The Modern Self. 1. The Theatrical Self: Social Drama and Personal Identity. 2. Subjects and Citizens: The Politics of Everyday Life. 3. Street People: The City as Experience, Dream and Nightmare. 4. The Consolations of Consumerism. 5. 'We Are Born Naked - Everything Else Is Drag': Clothing the Body, Fashioning the Self. 6. The Seduction of Romance: Fictions of Love, Narratives of Selfhood -- Pt. II. The Modern Age. 7. Sacred, Secular, Sublime: Modernity Performs the Death of God. 8. Machines and Skyscrapers: Technology as Experience, Hope and Fear. 9. From Enlightenment to Holocaust: Modernity and the End of Morality. 10. Modernism, Art and Culture. 11. The Image, the Spectral and the Spectacle: Technologies of the Visual. 12. Postmodern Times? |
| Summary |
This book provides the most wide-ranging account yet of the cultural and social dimensions of modernity as they have developed over the past two centuries or so. Synthesizing and reinterpreting the mass of recent research on city life, consumerism, fashion, technology, surveillance and social control, popular culture and the media, and the significance of 'modernism' in culture and the arts, the author draws out the tensions in our experiences and images of 'the modern' that underlie - and frequently undermine - the rational pretensions of the modern ethos and modern self-identity. Exploring the Modern provides an essential context for evaluating current discussions of the late twentieth-century cultural crisis and debates over a possible shift into the 'postmodern'. The book is theoretically sophisticated yet written in a lively and accessible style, making it an ideal text for students and researchers across the humanities and social sciences |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Civilization, Western -- 20th century.
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Civilization, Western -- 19th century.
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Civilization, Modern -- 20th century.
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Civilization, Modern -- 19th century.
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Social change.
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Modernism (Art)
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Modernism (Literature)
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Modernism (Aesthetics)
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| LC no. |
98007114 |
| ISBN |
0631196218 alkaline paper |
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0631196226 alkaline paper |
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