Interest in Walter Benjamin's extraordinarily subtle, imaginative use of the materialist view of history has grown strongly in recent years. His interpretations of the changes in culture brought about by technological media of representation, reproduction and dissemination, and the intricate connections he explores between politics and the phenomena of literature and the arts, continue to be among the richest sources of thought we have on these questions. This book shows the relationship between his work and that of Friedrich Schlegel, whose ideas were the foundation of the European Romantic movement, and in many ways the basis of modern literary study. The scope of this investigation extends to such diverse phenomena in our century as surrealism and the philosophical contradictions of modern physics.weiterlesen