Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought. This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays—some appearing for the first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.

Based on an intensive study of the original German text of Freud's writings, letters and journals, S. S. Prawer's new book is the first to make a full and systematic map of Freud's use of English literature. The great psychoanalyst has long been acclaimed as a polymath, as a practical doctor who was also a theoretician, as a writer of non-fiction which was also a counterpoint to the great novels of the early twentieth century, and as an essayist who, like Montaigne, absorbed all of the cultural world around him. Freud was fascinated by writings from many nations and languages, and his use of English shows the great range of his reading: from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw, Henry Fielding to George Eliot, Mark Twain to Thornton Wilder; from scientific works by Maxwell and Darwin to the economics of Adam Smith, Malthus and Keynes, and from psychology and anthropology to the origins of religion. Though Freud's genius was unique, his sense of being a citizen of a world far wider than Vienna was not, and it can tell us much about the exchange of ideas across national and linguistic frontiers. Though he was a reader par excellence, he was also a case study in how world literature can be used by men and women who are not professional literary scholars or critics -- and of how much it can come to mean to them, and for their sense of who they are.