Available From UC Press

In this vanguard collection, a stellar group of internationally known scholars explores a key period in the making of the modern West. Although the long-standing notion of "dual revolutions," economic in Britain and political in France, has been vigorously challenged in recent years, these authors find that "revolutionary" is an apt description of the important cultural transformations that took place in both France and Britain at the onset of modernity.

The essays, by social and cultural historians as well as by literary scholars, range over many critical themes within this cross-cultural revolution: class, politics, and the nature of social change; gender and identity; race and imperialism; and the reach of the cultural imaginary. Combining primary research with theoretical reflection, each chapter makes a fresh and compelling contribution to the rethinking of these crucial years in world history. The Age of Cultural Revolutions, a superb distillation of the interdisciplinary perspectives of culturally sensitive experts, is revolutionary in itself and will be a valuable model for scholars and students interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and France, European cultural history, and historical method.

Colin Jones, Professor of History at Warwick University, is author most recently of France (1999) and coauthor of The Medical World of Early Modern France (with Laurence Brockliss, 1997). Dror Wahrman is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Associate Editor of the American Historical Review, and author of Imagining the Middle Class (1995) and the forthcoming Cultural History of the Modern Self.

"This superb collection of essays brings together the most exciting new work in cultural and literary history. Although the authors focus on the various cultural revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the significance of their investigations extends far beyond that moment. They show how the major categories of modern social life took root in this era, but they emphasize the surprising and often paradoxical ways those developments took place. Nothing about the experience of class, gender, race, nation, sentiment or even death was pre-ordained. These essays will enable readers to take a fresh new look at the origins of modernity."—Lynn Hunt, editor of The New Cultural History and coeditor of Beyond the Cultural Turn

"This is a valuable and provocative set of essays. Differing markedly in subject matter, they are linked by their intelligence and concern to re-assess early modern English and French histories, and the differences conventionally drawn between them, in the light of current work on language, class, race and gender."—Linda Colley, author of Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837