• Age: 18
• Grade: 12

For centuries the histories of France and Germany have been linked in ways productive and destructive, and each nation's sense of itself has often been shaped by admiration of or hostility toward the other. Harold Mah explores the interweaving paths of German and French cultural identity that emerged in the Enlightenment and continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Mah argues that the efforts of German and French intellectuals and artists to formulate stable cultural identities constantly collapsed in the face of other powerful images and the rush of history. In Mah's view, these shifting conceptions of cultural identity are problematic phantasies, internally unstable and prone to falling apart under the pressure of events, only to be replaced by new, equally problematic constructions. Mah offers fresh analyses of a wide range of iconic texts and artworks, including those of Jacques-Louis David, de Staël, Diderot, and Rousseau in France and Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Mann, Marx, and Nietzsche in Germany.

Mah's book examines how attempts to define cultural identities were caught up in issues of language, gender, classical revival, politics, and modernity. Enlightenment Phantasies presents the shaping of cultural identity in narratives accessible not only to specialists but also to students and all readers concerned with the history of Western culture.

Harold Mah's profile page

Harold Mah is Professor of History at Queen's University, Canada. He is the author of The End of Philosophy, The Origin of Ideology: Karl Marx and the Crisis of the Young Hegelians.

Mah's survey of the clashing views on societal and political processes is an impressive tour de force.... This is a splendid book, exhibiting a keen intelligence and marshalling an impressive variety of evidence. Both students of literature and students of intellectual history will find it stimulating.

Literary Research/Recherche litteraire

Mah's... intelligent and provocative analysis and his close and careful reading of texts deepen our understanding of the nature of, and connections between, a variety of intellectual movements from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the modernism of the twentieth.

Canadian Journal of History

Mah's fresh and innovative analysis of the works of French and German intellectuals and artists in establishing at times intertwining cultural identities from 1750 to 1914 portrays these fantasies often dissolving into the opposites of the intended construction, where content becomes mere form or visual aesthetic imagery causes viewer displacement.... Highly recommended. College and university libraries.

Choice

This well informed, fascinating and lucid dissection of contradictions and inconsistencies provides a stimulating approach to a range of debates and cultural products, firmly rooted in their historical context.

Modern and Contemporary France

Harold Mah's pithy, elegant, and immensely stimulating book addresses what could be called the culture of ideas in the French and German Enlightenment.... The book develops like a piece of music, with chapters on language, aesthetics and history offering a series of increasingly complex variations on the opening motif.... Mah's intellectual history provides the immense service of foregrounding the role of imagination, desire, and fantasy in the history of ideas. It does so, moreover, both with rigor and without pretentiousness.

American Historical Review