"An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Avant-Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind," Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014):

The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an extraordinarily original philospher, whose influence on twentieth-century thinking goes well beyond philosophy itself. In

Behler discusses the current state of thought on modernity and postmodernity, detailing the intellectual problems to be faced and examining the positions of suc

Under tennis courts at a ruined Suffolk abbey, archaeologists make a thrilling find: the remains of St Edmund, king and martyr. He was venerated for centuries a