Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization

This book provides the first comprehensive account of the social and cultural aspects of modernity over the past two centuries. The author draws on and synthesizes recent research on the socio–cultural dimension of modernity and draws connections between disparate elements of cultural and social life in the modern era. Topics covered include the civilizing process, gender identity, sexuality, consumerism, city life, the role of popular culture and the media in structuring experience and aspirations, and the significance of "modernism" in culture and the arts. Exploring the Modern is an invaluable guide to the roots of contemporary experience. It provides an essential context for evaluating current discussions of the late 20th century cultural crisis and debates over a possible shift into the "postmodern". The book is theoretically sophisticated yet written in a lively and accessible style making it an ideal text for students across the humanities and social sciences.

Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: The Modern Self. 1. The Theatrical Self: social drama and personal identity. 2. Subjects and Citizens: the politics of everyday life. 3. Street People: the city as experience, dream and nightmare. 4. The Consolations of Consumerism. 5.′We Are Born Naked – Everything Else is Drag′: clothing the body, fashioning the self. 6. The Seduction of Romance: fictions of love, narratives of selfhood. Part II: The Modern Age. 7. Sacred, Secular, Sublime: modernity performs the death of God. 8. Machines and Skyscrapers: technology as experience, hope and fear. 9. From Enlightenment to Holocaust: modernity and the end of morality. 10. Modernism, Art and Culture. 11. The Image, the Spectral, and the Spectacle: technologies of the visual. 12. Postmodern Times?. Key Terms. Biographical Notes. Guide to Further Reading.

John Jervis has taught extensively in the areas of Sociology, Social Anthropology, and Cultural Studies, at the University of Kent at Canterbury.