Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery

For many of us, ruins are alluring, puzzling and endlessly fascinating: this elegant book seeks to explore why. What is it that makes us suspicious of works or histories that are too smooth, too continuous? Is it that urban experience is inherently discontinuous and fragmented, or that the only truths we can believe are partial ones?

Whether focusing on ancient ormodern remnants, literature or the visual arts, Ruins and Fragments is poetic without being sentimental. It offers new ways of understanding the history of modernity, while delighting in its reading of the world as a puzzle, and the ways in which we can reconstruct new forms of meaning.