The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture [Hardcover]

The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture explores the re-invention of the early European Baroque within the philosophical, cultural, and literary thought of postmodernism in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Gregg Lambert argues that the return of the Baroque expresses a principle often hidden behind the cultural logic of postmodernism in its various national and cultural incarnations, a principal often in variance with Anglo-American modernism. Writers and theorists examined include Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Octavio Paz, and Cuban novelists Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy.

A highly original and compelling reinterpretation of modernity, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture answers Raymond Williams' charge to create alternative national and international accounts of aesthetic and cultural history in order to challenge the centrality of Anglo-American modernism.

...in Return of the Baroque, Lambert recuperates associations between the baroque, multiple modernities and an awareness of representation as artifice. Monika Kaup

...compelling and exciting material...finely sensitive...fodder for conceptual, affective and perceptual thought...it remains to be seen, and so as yet to be written, whether others will step over Lambert's inspiring footsteps to deepen and to amplify his learned and spirited wide-ranging analyses for a truer understanding of the movement, the genre, the cycle, the table and the dynamism of modern and of postmodern baroque culture for a profounder grasp, above all, of our contemporaneity. Erik S. Roraback