Focusing on a wide range of philosophers and writers, from Nietzsche to Derrida and Flaubert to Borges, this book charts the history of the deployment of the concept of nihilism within the discourses of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and considers the similarities and differences between modernist and postmodernist approaches to nihilism.

Introduction: Modernity, Modernism, Nihilism PART I: PHILOSOPHICAL MODERNISM AND NIHILISM From the French Revolution to Nietzsche Nietzsche's Long Shadow PART II: AESTHETIC MODERNISM AND NIHILISM From Flaubert to Dada Kafka and After PART III: POSTMODERNISM AND NIHILISM Our Only Chance? Bibliography Index

SHANE WELLER  is Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006), and Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).