Networks, Narratives and Nations
Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond
9789463720755
346 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been widely postulated for several decades now. This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. It gathers together essays that engage with objects of study ranging from poetry, prose, and political ideas to painting, porcelain, and popular song, and which draw on examples in Icelandic, Arabic, German, Irish, Hungarian, and French, among other languages. The contributors study transcultural phenomena from the medieval and early modern periods through to the modern and postmodern era, frequently challenging conventional periodizations and analytical frameworks based on the idea of the nation-state.
Author Bio
Marjet Brolsma is Assistant Professor in European Cultural History at the European Studies department of the University of Amsterdam. She has been a research assistant at the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN), and published on intellectuals and the Great War, national identity discourses and ideas of Europe.
Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Literary and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanian and Balkan social, cultural and literary history; on travel writing and circulation of ideas and images; and on European identity as a whole.
Krisztina Lajosi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She studies nationalism in a historical perspective. Her publications include Staging the Nation: Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary, Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe, and The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe.
Enno Maessen is lecturer in Political History at the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. He works on cultural representations, urban history and the history of contemporary Turkey. Maessen is co-founder of the Turkey Studies Network in the Low Countries.
Marleen Rensen is a senior lecturer in Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in literary engagement and life writing and has a particular interest in the lives of French and German artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Marleen Rensen is a senior lecturer in Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in literary engagement and life writing and has a particular interest in the lives of French and German artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez is Associate Professor of European Literature and Culture in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in Spanish-Dutch-Anglo cultural exchanges in the early modern period and beyond. Her last edited volume is Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850) (2020)
Guido Snel is a writer and a senior lecturer teaching in the department of European Studies. He specializes in contemporary European literatures, with a specific focus on Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Emmanuel College. His most recent books – includ_x0002_ing The Polymath (2020) – have been concerned with the social history of knowledge, and he is now writing a social history of ignorance
Murray Pittock is Bradley Professor and Pro Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow. He is a member of the Board of the National Trust for Scotland and an adviser to the National Galleries, National Museums and Museums Galleries Scotland, and is currently working on a global history of Scotland for Yale University Press.
Manfred Beller has been a Lecturer and Professor of Comparative and German Literature at the universities of Bonn, Pavia, Messina and Bergamo. He studied mythological themes, travel literature, and methods of research in imagology. He edited, together with Joep Leerssen, Imagology (2007), and recently published Rheinblicke: Historische und literarische Perspektiven (Rhineviews: historical and literary perspectives, 2019).
John Breuilly is Emeritus Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. Books include Austria, Prussia and the Making of Modern Germany, 1806–1871 (2011). He is one of the editors of the journal Nations and Nationalism, and edited The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013) and Nineteenth-Century Germany (2001/20).
Mary-Ann Constantine is Reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. She studies the literature and history of Romantic-period Wales and Brittany and has a particular interest in travel writing. She recently led the project “Curious Travellers,” funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English at University College Cork. Her core research interests are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. She is the author of A Cultural History of the Irish Novel (2011), and co-general editor of Irish Literature in Transition (2020).
Ann Dooley is Professor Emerita of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Co-founder of the Celtic Studies Program at that 328 Networks, Narratives and Nations university, she was its director for many years. She publishes in the fields of medieval Irish saga and early and classical Irish poetry.
Tom Dunne is Emeritus Professor of History, National University of Ireland Cork. His Rebellions:Memoir, Memory and 1798 won the Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize. He is working on an overview of Irish art from 1750 to 1850.
Ina Ferris is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Ottawa. She has published widely on the historical novel, national tales and the culture of the book in Britain during the Romantic period. Her most recent book is Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere (2015).
R. F. Foster is Emeritus Professor of Irish History at Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of many prize-winning books, including The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (2001) and the authorized biography of W. B. Yeats (1997–2003).
Terry Gunnell is Professor of Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. He is author of The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (1995), and joint editor of Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið (The Painter and Cultural Creation: Sigurður Guðmundsson and Kvöldfélagið, with Karl Aspelund).
David Hopkin is Professor of European Social History at the University of Oxford where he specializes in oral culture. He is author of Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (2012) and co-editor of Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture (2018)
John Hutchinson is Visiting Senior Fellow in Nationalism at the London School of Economics. He established a cultural approach to nationalism in The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism (1987) and Modern Nationalism (1994). More recently, in Nationalism and War (2017), he has integrated the experience of war and historical division into the study of nationalism.
Lotte Jensen is Professor of Dutch Cultural and Literary History at Radboud University. She has published widely on the emergence of Dutch national thought and cultural nationalism from a literary-historical perspective. Together with Joep Leerssen and Marita Mathijsen, she co-edited Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation (2010).
Michael Kemper is Professor of East European History at the University of Amsterdam. Trained in Arabic, Islamic and Slavic Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, he focuses on Islam in the Volga-Ural and North Caucasus regions, on the history of Soviet Oriental Studies and on the interaction between the languages of Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Marita Mathijsen is Professor Emeritus of Dutch Literature at Amsterdam University. She specializes in nineteenth-century culture and in editing science. Together with Joep Leerssen she has organized congresses on “primal texts” (Oerteksten) and on Free Access to the Past. In 1998 she received the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize for the Humanities.
Hercules (Iraklis) Millas (b.1940) is a political scientist (PhD) and a civil engineer. He taught Turkish political thought and Greek literature in various Greek and Turkish universities. His publications cover fields such as literature, language, historiography, textbooks and interethnic perceptions, mostly related to Turkey and Greek-Turkish relations.
Diarmuid Ó Giolláin is Professor in the Department of Irish Language and Literature, Concurrent Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She has published widely in the field of memory studies and was co-editor (with Joep Leerssen) of Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2014). She currently directs the European Research Council-funded project “Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe.”
Tom Shippey is Professor Emeritus of St Louis University and has published widely on Old English, on the history of philology and on modern receptions of medieval literature.
Eric Storm is Senior Lecturer in European History at Leiden University. He published the Culture of Regionalism (2010) and The Discovery of El Greco (2016). He is co-editor along with Xosé Núñez Seixas of Regionalism in Modern Europe (2019) and with Stefan Berger of Writing the History of Nationalism (2019)
Anne-Marie Thiesse is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France. A specialist in cultural history, she is the author of La création des identités nationales, Europe, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (1999) and La fabrique de l’écrivain national (2019). She is a member of the research team “Transferts culturels” (“Cultural Transfers”) at the CNRS-École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
Jo Tollebeek is Professor of Cultural History since 1750 at KU Leuven. Since 2015 he has also been Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the same university. He has published on the history of historiography and historical culture, and on the history of science, universities and collections from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
Balázs Trencsényi is Professor of History at the Central European University, and co-director of Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies. His main field of interest is the history of modern political thought in east-central Europe. His most recent book is Brave New Hungary: Mapping the “System of National Cooperation” (2019).
Michael Wintle is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam, where until 2019 he was head of the European Studies Department. His most recent book is Eurocentrism: History, Identity, White Man’s Burden (2020).
