If, as so many now seem to agree, "everything changed" around the beginning of the 1980s, it should scarcely be surprising that there was also a shift in perspective with regard to our immediate past. The recent history from which the contemporary world arises is no longer the nineteenth century, but the modernism of the twentieth. In turn, our new "classicism" is no longer drawn from the ancient world, but has moved forward in time to the Renaissance and periods closer to our own, the artworks of which are now understood in a different relationship to the present. In this groundbreaking book, the acclaimed theorist and critic Fredric Jameson shows how this revised perspective changes the critical reception of Rubens, Wagner and Mahler. Such readings are proposed for other arts, while studies of late modernism in film complete the critical revision with an examination of the narrative mode closest to literature. A series of explorations into contemporary artistic trends and experiments, into the staging of dramatic works, the national epic, science fiction, the new forms of TV series, and even contemporary North American literary tendencies complete a broad panorama of the aesthetic future. Book jacket.