Literary and cultural studies in the late twentieth century were very much shaped by debates of modernism and postmodernism as labels for successive periods, but also for different, competing interpretations of recent cultural history. In the twenty-first century, the shock waves that were sent through the global system on political, cultural, economic, and ecological levels by terrorist attacks, regional conflicts, poverty, the financial crisis and the threat of environmental disaster raise anew the question of how and to what extent the tradition of modernity - enlightenment ideas of...