Living Streams: Continuity and Change from Rabelais to Joyce

This booka examines how a long line of imaginative writers, starting from Rabelais and continuing over Cervantes and Sternea down to such modernists asa Proust,a Mann, Joyce, and Barth, hasa reaffirmed the picture of ana enduringa Western civilization despite repeated crises and transformations. The humanist capacity to recapture a sense of European greatness as exhibiteda in Antiquity was paralleled bya and continued in the guise ofa newer vernacular works,a achievementsa regardeda as vital forms of a shared culturala rebirth.a This was amplified most notably in the tradition of the ironica encyclopedic novel which surveyed the state of successive phases of culture. The evolving heritage and revitalization of the arts constituted main subject matters in thea series of major self-conscious epochala movements, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism, which Postmodernism reflexively nowa struggles to supersede.a a