This book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism. My study does not extend to Spanish modernismo, but limits itself to the interpretation of selected writings from the cultural spaces of France, England, and Germany, including locations which, in their own individual ways, were in Germany's philosophical and literary orbit from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries – Kierkegaard's Copenhagen and Kafka's Prague. My project is, at one level, comparative in the classical sense of that term, in that I pursue the categories of the sublime (das Erhabene) and the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit) across national borders, in the belief that the transition from the first to the second of these terms is a determining factor in the movement from Romanticism to Modernism. At the same time, however, the mode of my pursuit is not that of traditional intellectual history, in which individual texts are mustered to exemplify the general concepts under investigation, but rather the reverse: I begin and always remain with individual texts and find, within them, the points of emergence of the sublime and the uncanny, those areas that are inhabited or haunted by these categories.

Both the sublime, in its Kantian definition, and the uncanny as theorized by Freud via E. T. A. Hoffmann, are hybrid notions in that they are built upon the complex mixture and interplay of the aesthetic and the ethical.