The Democracy of Modern Fiction. 'The Lost Thread' is Jacques Ranciere's latest contribution to an ongoing philosophical revival of the thinking of aesthetics. In this book he debunks the notion of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Conrad, Woolf and Keats as reactionary producers of bourgeois mythologies, and instead foregrounds the egalitarian and democratic impulses of modernist literature. Contrary to the canonical interpretation of the relation between modernism and capitalism via the commodification of everyday life, he proposes a radical rethinking of our received ideas regarding the politics of aesthetics in the modern era.