Stranded in the Present : Modern Time and the Melancholy of History
Editorial Reviews
Review
James Sheehan, Stanford University : Peter Fritzsche's prose is both elegant and arresting, his insights always interesting. Stranded in the Present will attract a wide audience not only of experts but of general readers interested in how modern culture constructs its own past.
Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles : An elegantly written book on an important and long neglected topic. Peter Fritzsche weaves a fascinating tale of how we came to our sense of modern time and the consequences of it. I expect this book to become a standard point of reference for the argument that the notion of modern time had an abrupt 'beginning' in the French revolutionary and especially Napoleonic wars. These upheavals created a kind of nostalgia about the past, that is, for what was lost in the transition to the modern. Thus melancholy and the conviction that our times are distinctly modern go hand in hand. Stranded in the Present provides an accessible, thoughtful, and even beautiful example of how to think about the category of time. It will be much discussed in many different circles.
Book Description
In this inventive book, Peter Fritzsche explores how Europeans and Americans saw themselves in the drama of history, how they took possession of a past thought to be slipping away, and how they generated countless stories about the sorrowful, eventful paths they chose to follow.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, contemporaries saw themselves as occupants of an utterly new period. Increasingly disconnected from an irretrievable past, worried about an unknown and dangerous future, they described themselves as indisputably modern. To be cast in the new time of the nineteenth century was to recognize the weird shapes of historical change, to see landscapes scattered with ruins, and to mourn the remains of a bygone era.
Tracing the scars of history, writers and painters, revolutionaries and exiles, soldiers and widows, and ordinary home dwellers took a passionate, even flamboyant, interest in the past. They argued politics, wrote diaries, devoured memoirs, and collected antiques, all the time charting their private paths against the tremors of public life. These nostalgic histories take place on battlefields trampled by Napoleon, along bucolic English hedges, against the fairytale silhouettes of the Grimms' beloved Germany, and in the newly constructed parlors of America's western territories.
This eloquent book takes a surprising, completely original look at the modern age: our possessions, our heritage, and our newly considered selves.
Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History,Peter Fritzsche,Harvard University Press,0674013395,19th century,Europe,Historiography,History,History - General History,History: World,Modern - General,Philosophy,Political History,Social History,History / Modern / General,World history: from c 1900 -
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