Ranging widely across countries and centuries, National Thought in Europe critically analyzes the growth of nationalism from its beginnings in medieval ethnic prejudice to the romantic era’s belief in a national soul. A fertile pan-European exchange of ideas, often rooted in literature, led to a notion of a nation’s cultural individuality that transformed the map of Europe. By looking deeply at the cultural contexts of nationalism, Joep Leerssen not only helps readers understand the continent’s past, but he also provides a surprising perspective on contemporary European identity politics.
Re-Thinking Europe sets out to investigate the place of the idea of Europe in literature and comparative literary studies. The essays in this collection turn to the past, in which Europe became synonymous with a tradition of peace and tolerance beyond national borders, and enter into a critical dialogue with the present, in which Europe has increasingly become associated with a history of oppression and violence. The different essays together demonstrate how the idea of Europe cannot be thought apart from the tension between the regional and the global, between nationalism and pluralism, and can therefore be re-thought as an opportunity for an identity beyond national or ethnic borders. Engaging contemporary discourses on hybrid, postcolonial, and transnational identity, this volume shows how literature can function as both a vital tool to forge new identities and a power subversive of such attempts at identity-formation. Like Europe, it is always marked by the tension between integration and resistance. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of modern literature, comparative literature, and European studies, as well as people concerned with cultural memory and the relation between literature and cultural identity.
This collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to offer perspectives on national identity formation in various European contexts between 1600 and 1815. Contributors challenge the dichotomy between modernists and traditionalists in nationalism studies through an emphasis on continuity rather than ruptures in the shaping of European nations in the period, while also offering an overview of current debates in the field and case studies on a number of topics, including literature, historiography, and cartography.
A daring literary masterpiece and winner of the National Book Award In this magnificent work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye on the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century to render a mesmerizing perspective on human experience during wartime. Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of these two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined, Europe Central captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional— a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life.
Examining the history of nationalism's pervasive influence on modern politics and cultural identities, Lloyd Kramer discusses how nationalist ideas gained emotional and cultural power after the revolutionary upheavals in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Nationalism in Europe and America analyzes the multiple historical contexts and intellectual themes that have shaped modern nationalist cultures, including the political claims for national sovereignty, the emergence of nationalist narratives in historical writing and literature, the fusion of nationalism and religion, and the overlapping conceptions of gender, families, race, and national identities. Kramer emphasizes the similarities in American and European nationalist thought, showing how European ideas about land, history, and national destiny flourished in the United States while American ideas about national independence and political rights reappeared among European nationalists and also influenced the rise of anticolonial nationalisms in twentieth-century Asia and Africa. By placing nationalist ideas and conflicts within the specific, cross-cultural framework of Atlantic history and extending his analysis to the twentieth-century world wars, Kramer offers readers a thoughtful perspective on nationalism's enduring political and cultural importance throughout the modern world.
The articulation of collective identity by means of a stereotyped repertoire of exclusionary characterizations of Self and Other is one of the longest-standing literary traditions in Europe and as such has become part of a global modernity. Recently, this discourse of Othering and national stereotyping has gained fresh political virulence as a result of the rise of “Identity Politics”. What is more, this newly politicized self/other discourse has affected Europe itself as that continent has been weathering a series of economic and political crises in recent years. The present volume traces the conjunction between cultural and literary traditions and contemporary ideologies during the crisis of European multilateralism. Contributors: Aelita Ambrulevičiūtė, Jürgen Barkhoff, Stefan Berger, Zrinka Blažević, Daniel Carey, Ana María Fraile, Wulf Kansteiner, Joep Leerssen, Hercules Millas, Zenonas Norkus, Aidan O’Malley, Raúl Sánchez Prieto, Karel Šima, Luc Van Doorslaer,Ruth Wodak
The book is a comparative analysis of the ideological constructions of national specificity in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Studying the growing infatuation with "national essence" it seeks to understand the radicalization of nationalism in East Central Europe in connection with the shift of the notions of historicity and temporality. Trencsényi provides a contextual analysis of the symbolic resources and available ideological references that were used for creating these discourses in the respective countries. While focusing on the interwar period when these conceptions became central to the political debate, he also reconstructs the long-term historical evolution of the discourse of ‘national characterology’. Through this prism the work offers a contextual reconstruction of the main debates of these elites on national identity from the mid-19th century until 1945. In the light of the three case studies, the volume contributes to discussions of the problem of modernism and anti-modernism in twentieth-century political thought, posing the question of the intellectual responsibility of intellectuals in constructing radical ideological frameworks. This book offers a broad intellectual panorama, discerning the common regional features as well as the considerable divergence between these three cases, while also placing them into a wider European intellectual framework of the emergence of radical nationalism.
An examination of the ceaseless controversies surrounding ideas of nation and nationalism, showing that they are very far from dead in twenty-first century Europe. Beginning by defining these terms and setting out theories and concepts clearly and concisely, this book analyses the impact of nationalism since the Second World War, covering themes including: * the relationship of nationalism to the Cold War * the re-emergence of demands by stateless nations * European integration and globalisation * immigration since the 1970s * the effects of nationalism on the former Soviet Union and Eastern block.
