This book is the first of its kind to provide wide-ranging access to important intellectual contexts that have helped mould the production and reception of twentieth-century literature. Among the disciplinary fields embraced are: philosophy of science, theories of knowledge, anthropology, psychoanalysis, religion, and social and political theory.

This volume picks its way through the tangled webs of our literary and intellectual history, sorting out the proliferation of contexts, of theses, methodologies and histories, drawing out connections as well as discontinuities between different orders of writing.

A substantial introductory essay examines the relations between literature and intellectual history and addresses such issues as the relation between present and previous fin de siecles; the reconstruction of Modernism and the future of the postmodern; the political, epistemological, and ethical nature of literary writing; the relations between science and literature.