Roberts portrays the total work of art not simply as a particular and peripheral genre of modern culture but rather as a fundamental idea that responded to the experience of desacralization in modernity . . . This book is impressive in sweep, thought-provoking in its challenges to accepted cultural schemas, and fascinating in the details it uncovers along the way. ... Read moreIn short: a grand synthetic account that truly holds together. It represents an important contribution to the re-thinking of modernism. -Peter Zusi, University College London,Monatshefte(2014) There is much to admire in Roberts' study of the total work of art and he convincingly makes the case for its importance. . . . Roberts' book provides a hugely insightful study of the total work of art. Most helpfully he uses this recurring motif as a way of breaking down conventional narratives about modernist politics, spirituality and aesthetic technique. -Claire Warden, Consciousness, Spirituality and the Arts (August 2013) With this volume, Roberts completes a trilogy devoted to European modernism. Art and Enlightenment (1991) offered a critical assessment of Adorno's theory of modern music, while Dialectic of Romanticism proposed a 'civil' alternative to Romantic nostalgia and Enlightenment progressivism. This new book, on the tangled legacy of Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (`total work of art'), is equally original, in approach and detailed readings. . . . The author traces its origins to the French Revolution and German Romanticism, and then monitors the cultural resonance of Wagner's Parsifal, via Nietzsche and Mallarme, which extends to the 20th-century avant-garde-particularly its odd mix of differentiation/synthesis of the arts, and its theatrical fusion of art and life. Finally he surveys the `sublime' politics of Fascist spectacle, which Walter Benjamin famously reduced to the `aestheticization of politics.' If the Nazis seem finally to have discredited the entire tradition, it nevertheless finds a spectral afterlife in contemporary theme parks and cyberspace. Ambitious, densely written, yet rewarding, this volume caps a remarkable achievement. Summing Up: Highly recommended. -Choice (1 September 2012) Show Less