The Horizon of Modernity provides an extensive account of New Confucian philosophy that cuts through the boundaries between history and thought. This study explores Mou Zongsan's and Tang Junyi's critical confrontation with Marxism and Communism in relation to their engagement with Western thinkers such as Kant and Hegel. The author analyzes central conceptual aporias in the works of Mou, Tang, as well as Xiong Shili in the context of the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China and the emergence of the discipline of philosophy in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history. This book casts new light on the nexus between the categories of subjectivity and social structure and the relation between philosophy, modern temporality, and the structural conditions of the modern world.

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

This important new book by a major voice in the Social Imaginaries movement offers the most systematic attempt to establish conceptual and historical links between the idea of modernity as a new civilization and the notion of multiple modernities. Arnason demonstrates a theory of globalization that is still compatible with the emphasis on unity and diversity of modernity as a civilization.

In this major new work, Bernstein explores the ethical andpolitical dimensions of the modernity/post-modernity debate. Bernstein argues that modernity / post-modernity should beunderstood as a kind of mood - one which is amorphous, shifting andprotean but which exerts a powerful influence on our currentthinking. Focusing on thinkers such as Heidegger, Derrida,Foucault, Habermas and Rorty, Bernstein probes the strengths andweaknesses of their work, and shows how they have contributed tothe formation of a new mood, a new and distinctive constellation ofideas. This new constellation has put ethical and political issues back onthe philosophical agenda, forcing us to confront anew, the Socraticquestion 'How should I live?'

Notions of civilization and barbarism were intrinsic to Eugène Delacroix’s artistic practice: he wrote regularly about these concepts in his journal, and the tensions between the two were the subject of numerous paintings, including his most ambitious mural project, the ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon. Exiled in Modernity delves deeply into these themes, revealing why Delacroix’s disillusionment with modernity increasingly led him to seek spiritual release or epiphany in the sensual qualities of painting. While civilization implied a degree of control and the constraint of natural impulses for Delacroix, barbarism evoked something uncontrolled and impulsive. Seeing himself as part of a grand tradition extending back to ancient Greece, Delacroix was profoundly aware of the wealth and power that set nineteenth-century Europe apart from the rest of the world. Yet he was fascinated by civilization’s chaotic underbelly. In analyzing Delacroix’s art and prose, David O’Brien illuminates the artist’s effort to reconcile the erudite, tradition-bound aspects of painting with a desire to reach viewers in a more direct, unrestrained manner. Focusing chiefly on Delacroix’s musings about civilization in his famous journal, his major mural projects on the theme of civilization, and the place of civilization in his paintings of North Africa and of animals, O’Brien links Delacroix’s increasingly pessimistic view of modernity to his desire to use his art to provide access to a more fulfilling experience. With more than one hundred illustrations, this original, astute analysis of Delacroix and his work explains why he became an inspiration for modernist painters over the half-century following his death. Art historians and scholars of modernism especially will find great value in O’Brien’s work.

Dissonances of Modernity illuminates the ways in which music, as an artifact, a practice, and a discourse redefines established political, social, gender, and cultural conventions in Modern Spain. Using the notion of dissonance as a point of departure, the volume builds on the insightful approaches to the study of music and society offered by previous analyses in regards to the central position they give to identity as a socially and historically constructed concept, and continues their investigation on the interdependence of music and society in the Iberian Peninsula. While other serious studies of the intersections of music and literature in Spain have focused on contemporary usage, Dissonances of Modernity looks back across the centuries, seeking the role of music in the very formation of identity in the peninsula. The volume's historical horizon reaches from the nineteenth-century War of Africa to the Catalan working class revolutions and Enric Granados' central role in Catalan identity; from Francisco Barbieri's Madrid to the Wagnerian's influence in Benito Perez Galdos' prose; and from the predicaments surrounding national anthems to the use of the figure of Carmen in Francoist' cinema. This volume is a timely scholarly addition that contemplates not only a broad corpus that innovatively comprises popular and high culture--zarzuelas, choruses of industrial workers, opera, national anthems--but also their inter-dependence in the artists' creativity.

DIVA new and more concrete understanding of the inseparability of colonialism and modernity that also explores how the rhetoric of modernity disguises the logic of coloniality and how this rhetoric has been instrumental in establishing capitalism as the econ/div