Burger aims to address the relationship between art and society from the emergence of bourgeois culture in the 18th century to the decline of modernism in the 20th century. Drawing on sociological as well as literary critical sources, he argues that avant-gardist movements of the early 20th century brought about the crisis of postmodernism. In The Decline of Modernism Burger charts the establishment of literary and artistic institutions since the Enlightenment and their apparent autonomy of the prevailing political systems.