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Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.
Price: $140.00
Pages: 386
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Literary Modernism
Publication Date:
19 June 2025
ISBN: 9789004519862
Format: Hardcover
Thorsten Carstensen is Lecturer of German at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and International Scholar of German at Indiana University – Indianapolis, USA. His current research interests include the life reform movement around 1900 and architectural discourses in German literature. He is the author of Romanisches Erzählen. Peter Handke und die epische Tradition (2013) and co-editor of Heimat in Literatur und Kultur. Neue Perspektiven (2023). He has also published on Hollywood cinema and Anglophone literature.
Mattias Pirholt is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on aesthetic issues such as autonomy, imitation, and intermediality. He has written extensively on Swedish, German, and American literature, from the eighteenth century to today. His publications include Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism (2012), Grenzerfahrungen. Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (2018), and the co-edited volume Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics (2021).
Mattias Pirholt is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on aesthetic issues such as autonomy, imitation, and intermediality. He has written extensively on Swedish, German, and American literature, from the eighteenth century to today. His publications include Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism (2012), Grenzerfahrungen. Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (2018), and the co-edited volume Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics (2021).