Stranded in the Present : Modern Time and the Melancholy of History

Peter Fritzsche has given us a bold and ambitious book which will confirm his status as one of the leading intellectual and cultural historians of modern Europe...Fritzsche marshals a fascinating array of evidence, ranging from well-known products of the Romantic period like the writings of Francois-Rene Chateaubriand, William Cobbett, the Grimm Brothers, and Sir Walter Scott to those of more obscure but no less interesting personalities, such as the German art collector Sulpiz Boisseree and Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea, whose correspondence Fritzsche mines to good effect...Who, after finishing Fritzsche's book, will be able to think about the early nineteenth century as other than lost, fragmented, ruptured, shipwrecked, dispossessed, melancholic, broken, nostalgic. -- Robert Wohl "Modernism/modernity" (10/01/2005)