Literary Nonfiction. ESCAPE FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY is a group of essays by cultural critic Peter Lamborn Wilson and tackles the notion of modern progress: Did the Nineteenth Century ever come to an end? Was the "Twentieth" Century just a rerun? And what about the Twenty-First Century, the New Millennium? Another lackluster confirmation of the Eternal Return? Another garden of secondhand time? If to know "History" as tragedy is to escape its repetition as farce, then perhaps we need to look more deeply at this Past that won't stop haunting us. Two illuminated madmen—Charles Fourier and Friedrich Nietzsche—and two too-sane geniuses—J.P. Proudhon and Karl Marx—are enlisted in the breakout plan.

Author City: NEW PALTZ, NY USA

Peter Lamborn Wilson is co-author of Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology (Lindisfarne Books, 2007); and author of ESCAPE FOR THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND OTHER ESSAYS: FOURIER, MARX PROUDHOM AND NIETZSCHE (Autonomedia, 1998), plus numerous other books and essays. He is a longtime member of the Autonomedia Collective and lives in the Hudson Valley.