The Modern Spirit [antikvár]

PREFACE With one exception, the essays in this volume were published or delivered orally during the last five years. The dates and places of original publication or oral delivery are listed in the Acknowledgments. Since the subjects and occasions of the individual essays are diverse, this book makes no claim to unity. Yet the reader will, I hope, find that the essays when read together ring changes upon a number of recurring themes—themes that reflect my own continuing concern with the question of modernism, of what constitutes the modern spirit in literature and life. My main purpose in collecting these essays is not to draw out the recurring themes—it is the essays themselves that matter—but I hope that the essays will gain in richness through the reverberations among them and through the implicit accrual, as the reader moves forward, of an idea of the modern. By modern, I mean the post-Enlightenment tradition that connects the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This will be evident enough if I name just a few of the themes that recur here—the new nineteenth-century concept of culture, for example, or the