Discourse of Modernism

Timothy J. Reiss is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of The Meaning of Literature (also published by Cornell University Press), Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe, Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange, and Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism.

This 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)