Larry Shiner: The Invention of Art: a Cultural History (2001)

“With The Invention of Art, Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention—that the lines drawn between art and craft resulted from key social transformations in Europe during the long eighteenth century.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2001
ISBN 0226753425, 9780226753423
xix+362 pages

Interview (Platypus Review, 2014)
Review: Mitch Avila (JAAC 2003).
Commentary: Luis Puelles Romero (Contrastes ES 2005), David Clowney (Contemporary Aesthetics 2008).

Wikipedia
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (18 MB, updated on 2023-5-19)

Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, Thijs Weststeijn (eds.): The Making of the Humanities, Vol. 3: The Modern Humanities (2014)

“This comprehensive history of the humanities focuses on the modern period (1850-2000). The contributors, including Floris Cohen, Lorraine Daston and Ingrid Rowland, survey the rise of the humanities in interaction with the natural and social sciences, offering new perspectives on the interaction between disciplines in Europe and Asia and new insights generated by digital humanities.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 License
ISBN 9789089645166
724 pages

Conference
Publisher
OAPEN

PDF, PDF (6 MB, updated on 2022-12-20)
Volumes 1-2

Egon Friedell: A Cultural History of the Modern Age (1927–) [DE, EN]

Austrian essayist, cabaret performer, and amateur cultural historian Egon Friedell is best known for his brilliant, playful, and stimulating magnum opus, A Cultural History of the Modern Age (1927-31), written under the influence of Oswald Spengler and Jacob Burckhardt. He hoped for a rebirth of Western culture; the Modern Age, which was born from the Great Plague of the fourteenth century, has come to its end. At the eve of World War II, Friedell committed suicide by jumping from a window of his apartment. The German writer Thomas Mann ranked Friedell as one of the greatest stylists of the German language.

A Cultural History of the Modern Age, inspired by H.G. Well’s The Outline of History (1920), is dedicated to Max Reinhardt. Its first volume deals with Renaissance and Reformation, the second Baroque, Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and the third part Romanticism, Liberalism, Imperialism, and Impressionism. Friedell’s view is subjective and intuitive – all history is saga and myth and it is nothing more than a difference in degree between historian and poet. “All the classifications man has ever devised are arbitrary, artificial, and false,” Friedell wrote, “but simple reflection also shows that such classifications are useful, indispensable, and above all unavoidable since they accord with an innate aspect of our thinking.” Following the Hegelian lines of though, Friedell sees his subject basically as a the process of spiritual history. Oswald Spengler’s (The Decline of the West, 1918-1922) pessimism and atheism he rejects. From the English writer, historian, and critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Friedell adopted the romantic “great man” theory of history, the hero-worship, totally ignoring its ominous connection with the political reality of his day. Every era and every generation has according to Friedell its own hero, a genius, who personifies the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Nietzsche was for Friedell the epitome of the pre-WW I era. (from Petri Liukkonen’s short biography of Friedell)

German edition
Publisher Beck, Munich, 1927, 1928, 1931
This edition, Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt am Main, 2009, 1335 pages

English edition
Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson
With an Introductory Essay by Alfred Polgar
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, 1930, 1931, 1932
Fifth printing, 1953 (Vol 1); Third printing, 1954 (Vol 2); First printing, 1932 (Vol 3)
353 + 457 + 489 pages
via hz40lat46

Review (of Vol 1, Crane Brinton, Speculum, 1953)
Review (of Vols 1-2, International Journal of Ethics, 1932)
Review (of Vol 2, Eli Siegel, Scribner’s Magazine, 1931)
Review (of Vol 3, Robert Briffault, Scribner’s Magazine, 1932)
Review (of Vol 1, C. Hartley Grattan, The Forum, 1930)
Review (of Vol 1, David Owen, The Saturday Review, 1930)
Review (of Vol 2, The Saturday Review, 1932)
Review (of Vol 3, Alfred M. Frankfurter, The Bookman, 1932)

Wikipedia (DE)

Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit; Kulturgeschichte Ägyptens (German, 1927-31/2009, at Archive.org)
A Cultural History of the Modern Age, Volume I, Volume II, Volume III (English, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 1930-32, no OCR)