This uniquely comprehensive book on modernism traces the history and socio-cultural formations of modernity from Early Modern Europe to the era of global postmodernity.' It synthesizes the explosion of scholarship on modernity and draws connections between disparate elements of cultural and social life in the modern era.Demonstrating links, it points out underlying patterns that connect what can appear to be separate aspects of cultural and social life in the modern period. It shows patterns and consequences, rather than origins, causes and processes. It also shows how a coherent and distinctive analysis of these dimensions of modernity can draw on the novel (Conrad, Woolf), fashion (Chanel, Westwood), the theater (Wilde), and the media in general, as well as the work of cultural and social theorists (Benjamin, Foucault, Sennett, Sontag, Baudrillard, et al).Exploring the Modern forwards the view that modernity as project' -- the orientation to the world through rational', purposive control -- has always been in tension both with the actual experience and consciousness of the modern', and with the theatrical dimension of modern identity -- the exploration of culture as contingent, arbitrary, and excessive'. These tensions increasingly result in a shift towards a reflexive' grasp of the world and our place in it, through self-consciousness and a heightened concern with problems of image and representation that become central, in the media age, without resolving the underlying problems.