"This is a major text, a key intervention in a book length format into one of the most discussed areas of intellectual and historical thinking today, with the stylish and incisive arguments that we have come to expect from Elizabeth Ermarth." Keith Jenkins, University of Chichester, UK
"This book is unusual and unusually powerful in its argument, its argumentation, and its potential impact . . . Ermarth's ability to discuss, with lucidity and elegance, the most complex of ideas is what will make the book work for both a specific academic audience and a more general informed readership . . . Ermarth thinks big. She also thinks deeply. She knows her way around all the complex debates of the last 30 years and articulates them with clarity and often pointed critique. It is quite simply a really important book." Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
In this bold new book, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth traces the broadly established challenges to modernity that now confront historians and citizens of Western societies generally. She puts forward a clear definition of both the Modern Condition and of the Discursive Condition that challenges it, and she briefly introduces the most important practical implications of those challenges to accepted definitions and tools of thought.
After decades of conflicting work on related issues, this book provides a succinct, lucid, and wide-ranging discussion of what is at stake. Drawing on a broad range of intellectual and cultural history, from Homer to Hayden White and from the arts to physics, philosophy, and politics, this book defines a new stage in the history of ideas. With the practice and assumptions of historians at its core, the book demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary practice in addressing the big questions currently confronting the humanities and social sciences.
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, University of Edinburgh, UK, and Trent University, Canada, teaches and writes about interdisciplinary cultural history and theory.
