Böcker av Liisa Steinby

This edited collection is the first volume solely dedicated to research on Johann Gottfried Herder's understanding of history, time, and temporalities.Although his ideas on time mark an important transition period that advanced the emergence of the modern world, scholars have rarely addressed Herder's temporalities. In eight chapters, the volume examines and illuminates Herder's conception of human freedom in connection with time; the importance of the concept of forces (Kräfte) for a dynamic ontology; human beings' sensuous experience of inner and external temporality; Herder's conception of Bildung, speculations on extra-terrestrial beings and on different perceptions of time; the mythological figure Nemesis and Herder's view of the past and the future; the temporal dimension in Herder's aesthetics; and Herder's biblical studies in relationship to divine infinitude and human temporality. The volume concludes by outlining the influence of Herder's understanding of time on following generations of thinkers.Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder is ideal for scholars, graduates, and postgraduates interested in Herder's metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of history, as well as any scholar concerned with 18th-century concepts of time and the emergence of the modern world at the beginning of the 19th century.

Myth in the Modern Novel: Imagining the Absolute posits a twofold thesis. First, although Modernity is regarded as an era dominated by science and rational thought, it has in fact not relinquished the hold of myth, a more "primitive" form of thought which is difficult to reconcile with modern rationality. Second, some of the most important statements as to the reconcilability of myth and Modernity are found in the work of certain prominent novelists. This book offers a close examination of the work of eleven writers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, representing German, French, American, Czech and Swedish literature. The analyses of individual novels reveal a variety of intriguing views of myth in Modernity, and offer an insight into the "modernizing" transformations myth has undergone when applied in the modern novel. The study shows the presence of the "subconscious", the mythic layer, in modern western culture and how this has been dealt with in novelistic literature.

While a large amount of scholarship about Milan Kundera's work exists, in Liisa Steinby's opinion, his work has not been studied within the context of (European) modernity as a sociohistorical and a cultural concept. Steinby's book fills this vacuum by analysing Kundera's novels from the viewpoint of his understanding of the existential problems in the culture of modernity.