In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: The age of questions. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task.
The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century, says a review on the Prince University Press website.
Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time?
In this pioneering book, Holly Case, associate professor of history at Brown University, undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age.
Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history, says the review. Case ingeniously explores the urgent ‘questions’ that European commentators found so compelling, and she excavates the multifarious dimensions of these questions in all their interlocking complexity, commented Larry Wolff of New York University.
