Throughout Europe, nostalgia and modernization embraced around 1800: the rise of historicism coincided with the emergence of the modern nation-state. Poetical, cultural changes intersected with political, institutional ones: a Romantic taste for medieval or tribal antiquity benefited from a modernization-driven transfer of cultural relics into the public sphere. This process involved the establishment of museums, libraries, archives and university institutes, as well as the dissemination of historical knowledge through text editions, philological studies, historical novels, plays, operas and...

The grand duchy of Luxembourg was created after the Napoleonic Wars, but at the time there was no 'nation' that identified with the emergent state. This book analyses how politicians, scholars and artists have initiated and contributed to nation-building processes in Luxembourg since the nineteenth century, processes that - as this book argues - are still ongoing. The focus rests on three types of representations of nationhood: a shared past, a common homeland and a national language. History was written so as to justify the country's political independence. Territorial borders shifted...

Exploring Transylvania by Torok reconstructs the fissured scholarly landscape in one of the most culturally heterogeneous regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. The author creates an original model of the structure and historical dynamics of an East-Central European province in the republic of letters by tracing the activities of learned societies engaged in the exploration of their fatherland and their connections to national academic centers outside Transylvania. Analyzing the entangled history of the local German, Hungarian, and Romanian scholarly cultures, the book demonstrates how a...

Recognising the importance of the Middle Ages as a vital point of reference in the construction of national identities, this challenging book examines the remarkable role played by the period in the grand duchy of Luxembourg. This country is representative of the close relationship between historicism and nation-building in modern Europe. Tracing the fortunes of four pivotal figures from their own lifetimes to the present, this book uncovers how they each entered collective memory and came to play a key role in a national narrative of history. The analysis includes the foundation myth of...

The growth of nations, national ideologies and the accompanying quest for the 'authentic' among 'the people' has been a subject of enquiry for many disciplines. Building upon wide-ranging scholarship, this interdisciplinary study seeks to analyse the place of folklore in the long nineteenth century throughout Europe as an important symbol in the growth and development of nations and nationalism, and in particular to see how combining perspectives from History, Literary Studies, Music and Architecture can help provide enhanced and refreshing perspectives on the complex process of...

The nineteenth century laid the foundations of history, both professional and popular. The authors of this collection compare Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium, unearthing the ways in which history was conceived and then utilized, usually for nationalistic purposes.

Across the nineteenth century European history, philology, archaeology, art, and architecture turned from a common classical vocabulary and ideology to images of pasts and origins drawn primarily from the Middle Ages. The result was a paradox, as scholars and artists, schooled in the same pan-European vocabularies and methodologies nevertheless sought to discover through them unique and, frequently, oppositional national identities. These essays, edited by Patrick J. Geary and Gabor Klaniczay, focus on this all-European phenomenon with a special focus on Scandinavia and East-Central Europe,...

The United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830) was a creation of the Congress of Vienna, where the map of Europe was redrawn following Napoleon's defeat. Dutch language and literature were considered the essential tools to smoothly fuse the North and South - today, the Netherlands and Belgium respectively. King Willem I tried a variety of measures to stimulate and control literary life in the South, in an effort to encourage unity throughout his kingdom. Janneke Weijermars describes the driving force of this policy and especially its impact in the South. For some authors, Northern Dutch...

This wide-ranging contribution to the study of nationalism and the social history of music examines the relationship between choral societies and national mobilization in the nineteenth century. From Norway to the Basque country and from Wales to Bulgaria, this pioneering study explores and compares the ways choral societies influenced and reflected the development of national awareness under differing political and social circumstances. By the second half of the nineteenth century, organized communal singing became a primary leisure activity that attracted all layers of society. Though...

In National Poets, Cultural Saints Marijan Dovic and Jon Karl Helgason explore the ways in which certain artists, writers, and poets in Europe have become major figures of cultural memory, emulating the symbolic role formerly played by state rulers and religious saints. The authors develop the concept of cultural sainthood in the context of nationalism as a form of invisible religion, identify major shifts in canonization practices from antiquity to the nationally-motivated commemoration of the nineteenth century, and explore the afterlives of two national poets, Slovenia's France...