This book?examines how a long line of imaginative writers, starting from Rabelais and continuing over Cervantes and Sterne?down to such modernists as?Proust,?Mann, Joyce, and Barth, has?reaffirmed the picture of an?enduring?Western civilization despite repeated crises and transformations. The humanist capacity to recapture a sense of European greatness as exhibited?in Antiquity was paralleled by?and continued in the guise of?newer vernacular works,?achievements?regarded?as vital forms of a shared cultural?rebirth.? This was amplified most notably in the tradition of the ironic?encyclopedic novel which surveyed the state of successive phases of culture. The evolving heritage and revitalization of the arts constituted main subject matters in the?series of major self-conscious epochal?movements, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism, which Postmodernism reflexively now?struggles to supersede.??