What is the nature of the relationship between memory, identity, and culture in a recently federalized nation? In Belgian Memories, writers and scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including ethnology, linguistics, philosophy, literature, history, film, art history, and geography, ask to what extent Belgium's literary and visual environment (from novels to paintings, comic strips to movies, and architecture to urban planning) reflects distinctly Belgian ways of dealing with the past. Such issues have become more pressing since Belgium has reconstituted itself politically and must deal...

What epistemic assumptions framed eighteenth-century thinkers' speculations regarding origins? What, if anything, connected these speculations? The best way to understand the Enlightenment's obsession with origins is to study it in conjunction with the contemporary conceptualization of originality as a criterion of aesthetic value, Catherine Labio maintains. Her expansive survey of the era's thought places special emphasis on epistemology and is genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on such fields as anthropology, geometry, historiography, literary criticism, and political economy. One of the...