Dialectic of Romanticism [Paperback]

Dialectic of Romanticism presents a radical new assessment of the aesthetic and philosophical history and future of modernity. An exploration of the internal critique of modernism treats romanticism (later historicism and post-modernism) as central to the development of European modernism alongside enlightenment, and, like the enlightenment, subject to its own dead-ends and fatalities. An external critique of modernism recovers concepts of civilization and civic aesthetics which are trans-historical -simultaneously modern and classically inspired - and provides a counter both to romantic historicism and enlightened models of progress. Finally, a retrospective critique of modernism analyses what happens to modernism's romantic-archaic and technological-futurist visions when they are translated from Europe to America. Dialectic of Romanticism argues that out of the European dialectic of romanticism and enlightenment a new dialectic of modernity is emerging in the New World-one which points beyond modernism and postmodernism.

Reference & Research Book News, August 2006 mention

'The intellectual brilliance of Dialectic of Romanticism is evident on every page and it is refreshingly free of the defeatism evinced by many other works of cultural critique. It deserves to be widely read.' Vol 36, No 2, Pages 213-215, 2006 Professor Paul Bishop,Journal of European Studies