| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Peter Conrad. Modern Times, Modern Places. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1999. Pp. 752. $40.00.

This is a wonderful book, as slippery and subversive as its subject, that of meaning in cultural endeavor of the twentieth century. The book is so good, such a felicitous fusion of style and substance, that it is hard to imagine a historian writing it. Indeed, it comes as no surprise that Peter Conrad is not a professor of history but of English literature. In keeping, however, with the fate of category and definition in our century, Conrad's background and interests are far more eclectic than his official position suggests. He did his growing up, as he puts it, in Australia, and before this book his writing was concerned more with continental opera than with the English literary canon. His ambitious new work reflects that broader vision. Although the focus is on the West and on high culture, he takes on the century as a whole, looking at how the experience of life has changed. The result is both operatic and modern, as representative of the current state of historiographical art—its self-conscious vitality in the midst of methodological, even ontological crisis—as any recent book from within our discipline has been. . . .

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