Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity » (1)

David Ferris is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Theory and the Evasion of History and the editor of Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Essays (Stanford, 1996).

The study of Greece as an icon of culture appears to be as old as Greece itself, as if its cultural significance had attained full maturity at birth. In Silent Urns

, the author reveals how Greece attained such significance as the result of the attempt to reconcile individuality, freedom, history, and modernity in 18th-century aesthetics.