This collection contains key critical essays and assessments of the writings of Canadian communications thinker Marshall McLuhan selected from the voluminous output of the past 40 years. McLuhan's famous aphorisms and uncanny ability to sense megatrends are once again in circulation across and beyond the disciplines. Since his untimely death in 1980, McLuhan's ideas have been rediscovered and redeployed with urgency in the age of information and cybernation. Volume I regains interpretations by globally significant writers and theorists such as Tom Wolfe, Raymond Williams, Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, and reveals the contours of McLuhan's reception in France, as well as skirmishes with his leading ideas by journalists and postmodernists throughout the world. Volume II gathers essays by noted communications theorists such as James Carey, Donald Theall and Derrick de Kerckhove, linking McLuhan's influence across the arts and in relation to critical theory, literary theory and recent literature on postmodernism.
Volume III details the McLuhan renaissance of the 1990s in the rise of cyberculture, touching upon his elevation to patron saint of Wired magazine, providing a foundation for Paul Virilio's theses on speed, and interpretative framework for theorizing new technologies from geographic information systems to the Internet and cyborg life. This volume ends with reflections on McLuhan's significance for religious thought and metaphysical speculation. Together the three volumes organise and present some forty years of indispensable critical works for readers and researchers of the McLuhan legacy. The set includes critical introductions to each section by the editor.