Description
Book SynopsisTimothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class of discourse is replaced by another. He seeks to demonstrate that each new mode does not constitute a radical break from the past but in fact develops directly from its predecessor.
Trade ReviewThis is a difficult book which makes an interesting contribution to the history of ideas. It should be valued by those whose special field is seventeenth- or eighteenth- century literature and rhetoric, as well as by scholars of epistemology of aesthetic theory. Timothy J. Reiss is an erudite and provocative scholar.
-- Kirsty Cochrane * Review of English Studies *