"This book provides the most wide-ranging account yet of the cultural and social dimensions of modernity as they have developed over the past two centuries or so. Synthesizing and reinterpreting the mass of recent research on city life, consumerism, fashion, technology, surveillance and social control, popular culture and the media, and the significance of 'modernism' in culture and the arts, the author draws out the tensions in our experiences and images of 'the modern' that underlie - and frequently undermine - the rational pretensions of the modern ethos and modern self-identity."--BOOK JACKET. "Exploring the Modern provides an essential context for evaluating current discussions of the late twentieth-century cultural crisis and debates over a possible shift into the 'postmodern'. The book is theoretically sophisticated yet written in a lively and accessible style, making it an ideal text for students and researchers across the humanities and social sciences."--BOOK JACKET.