Instead of accepting postmodernism on its own terms as a radical break with previous Western modes of knowledge and representation, it is more faithful, argues the author of this book, to view it as a late phase in a tradition of specifically aestheticist modern thought inaugurated by philosophers such as Kant and embodied in romantic and modernist art. In pursuing this belief, the concern is as much to problematize the construction of modernism as with the elucidation of postmodernism. The first part of the book examines the main positions in the postmodernism debate, developing some of the book's central ideas in the process. The second part of the book devotes itself, in part, to the implications for modernism of the arguments advanced, and challenges views of modernist writing that derive from theories of autonomy. The discussion is supported by close readings of three postmodern and four modernist texts.