Faces of Modernity: Avant Garde Decadence Kitsch
by: Calinescu, Matei

Hardcover. Bloomington IN, Indiana University Press, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 335 pages. Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity-the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours-is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, Name on front fly leaf, several pages with light ink markings.