Called "the most important critic of his time" by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has also emerged as one of the most compelling thinkers of our time, his work assuming a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A "natural and extraordinary talent for lette[...]

Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie - such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers 27 pieces, 19 of which have never before been translated. The centrepi[...]

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback[...]

Radical critic of a European civilisation plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie - such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This third volume, in a four-volume set, offers 27 brilliant pieces - nineteen of which have never before been translated.[...]

This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of "working with" Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading of Benjam[...]

From 1927 to 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and presented more than eighty broadcasts over the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers, for the first time in English, the surviving transcripts. This eclectic collection shows the range of Benjamin's thinking and includes stories for young and old, p[...]

Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds--penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-[...]

One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly - and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some bo[...]

Seven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) continues to fascinate readers and influence academic writing, both stylistically and conceptually. Here Uwe Steiner offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre o[...]

This book places Benjamin's writing on revolution in the context of his conception of historical knowledge. The fundamental problem that faces any analysis of Benjamin's approach to revolution is that he deploys notions that belong to the domain of individual experience. His theory of modernity with[...]

Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics is an innovative and creative attempt to unsettle and reconceive the key concepts of religious studies through a reading with, and against, Walter Benjamin. Constructing what he calls an "allegorical aesthetics," Plate sifts through Benjamin's writings showi[...]

Long considered to be an impenetrable, hermetic treatise, Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama has rarely received the attention it deserves as a key text, central to a full understanding of his work. In this critically acclaimed study, distinguished Benjamin scholar Beatrice Hanssen [...]