Promotional Information

Benjamin's most sustained and original work, and one of the main sources of literary modernism

About the Author

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

Reviews

"Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of [the twentieth] century." Sunday Times "He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe." Susan Sontag