Ìn this contribution to the Giddens debate, Stjepan Mestrovic takes up and criticises the major themes of his work - particularly the concept of "high modernity" as oppossed to "postmodernity" and his attempted construction of a "synthetic" tradition based on human agency and structure.

Cronin profiles the life and literary career of the Irish writer.

In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.

Shanghai's "Literary Comet" When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of the city's Jazz-Age nightlife. Mu's highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read. As Andrew Field argues, Mu advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May Fourth giants Lu Xun and Lao She to reveal even more starkly the alienation of a city trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism in the 1930s. Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist includes translations of six short stories, four of which have not appeared before in English. Each story focuses on Mu's key obsessions: the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships in the modern city, and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure epitomized by the dance hall and nightclub. In his introduction, Field situates Mu's work within the transnational and hedonistic environment of inter-war Shanghai, the city's entertainment economy, as well as his place within the wider arena of Jazz-Age literature from Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and New York. His dazzling chronicle of modern Shanghai gave rise to Chinese modernist literature. His meteoric career as a writer, a flâneur, and allegedly a double agent testifies to cosmopolitanism at its most flamboyant, brilliant and enigmatic. Andrew Field's translation is concise and lively, and his account of Mu Shiying's adventure in modern Shanghai is itself a fascinating story. This is a splendid book for anyone interested in the dynamics of Shanghai modern." — David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "Mu Shiying was one of China's pioneer modernists, and his stories are full of inventive touches, including his own experimental technique of stream-of-consciousness, that evoke the emergent splendour of urban decadence of Shanghai in the 1930s. This English translation of his most important stories edited and translated by an acknowledged historian of Shanghai culture is long overdue." — Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China: 1930–1945 "During his short, tumultuous life, Mu Shiying produced a small oeuvre of remarkable short stories that stand out in the wider context of modern Chinese literature. He captures the essence of the Shanghai jazz age with his racy, musical, and often fragmented prose, which blends a genuine excitement about the wonders of "the Paris of the East" with an at times sobering undertone of social critique. Unlike some of the more explicitly left-wing writers of his time, Mu never relinquishes the medium for the message. He is first and foremost a writer of experimental, original work that even nowadays has lost nothing of its power. As a teacher of modern Chinese literature, I am delighted that this new translation has become available." —Michel Hockx, Director, SOAS China Institute

This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.

The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.