Joep Leerssen – författare

At the core of nationalism, the nation has always been defined and celebrated as a fundamentally cultural community. This pioneering cultural history shows how artists and intellectuals since the days of Napoleon have celebrated and taken inspiration from an idealized nationality, and how this in turn has informed and influenced social and political nationalism. The book brings together tell-tale examples from across the entire European continent, from Dublin and Barcelona to Istanbul and Helsinki, and from cultural fields that include literature, painting, music, sports, world fairs and cinema as well as intellectual history. Charismatic Nations offers unique insights into how the unobtrusive soft power of nationally-inspired culture interacts with nationalism as a hard-edged political agenda. It demonstrates how, thanks to its pervasive cultural and 'unpolitical' presence, nationalism can shape-shift between romantic insurgency and nativist populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Marked by names such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Patrick Pearse, the decade 1910-1920 was a period of revolutionary change in Ireland, in literature, politics and public opinion. What fed the creative and reformist urge besides the circumstances of the moment and a vision of the future? The leading experts in Irish history, literature and culture assembled in this volume argue that the shadow of the past was also a driving factor: the traumatic, undigested memory of the defeat and death of the charismatic national leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891). The authors reassess Parnell's impact on the Ireland of his time, its cultural, religious, political and intellectual life, in order to trace his posthumous influence into the early twentieth century in fields such as political activism, memory culture, history-writing, and literature.

This volume examines the role of the broad variety of international exhibitions between 1851 and 1958 in two programmatic essays and twelve case studies, covering not just France and the United States, but also, among others, Sweden, Romania, Colombia, Japan and the nascent European Community.World fairs were global platforms for the construction of national identities. The mix of national self-profiling and commercial exoticism turned the nation into a “brand”, while reframing the nation-state from its nineteenth-century positioning amidst neighbouring enemies towards being a competitor in a global, consumer-oriented trade and entertainment economy. By presenting national identities in “banal” form as feelgood factors, world fairs helped the nation to maintain its grassroots appeal across the century of totalitarianism and internationalism.Contributors are: Joep Leerssen, Eric Storm, Florian Groß, Anthony Swift, Cosmin Minea, Claire Hendren, Taka Oshikiri, Robert W. Rydell, Sven Schuster, Miriam Oesterreich, Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk, Christina Romlid, Jonathan Voges, and Anastasia Remes.

The interest of Anglo-Irish literature is not only that its canon includes a high proportion of literary giants - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett - but also that it exemplifies the problematics of literature in a context of social and cultural tension. Irish literary history has often been studied under precisely that aspect: as the literature of a country in a marginal, colonial yet intra-European position; a country where a variety of cultural traditions (Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Presbyterian) have coexisted in an uneasy relationship; a country with intense social and economic divisions. These infrastructural tensions are not mere background or part of the context, but have been explicitly thematized in a substantial part of Ireland's literary output, so that an Irish author who does not address the matter of Ireland stands out as an anomaly, an exception to the general patterns. Therefore, the historical context of much Anglo-Irish scholarship is hardly surprising. Forging the Smithy: National Identity and Representation in Anglo-Irish Literary History addresses three interrelated areas of interest: language, territory and politics; the role of historical consciousness in Irish authors and in their dissemination; and the representation of Irish affairs asa it gives rise to specific literary strategies.

Bringing together sources from many countries and many centuries, this study critically analyses the growth of national thought and of nationalism — from medieval ethnic prejudice to the Romantic belief in a nation's 'soul'. A topical history of nationalism provides also a surprising perspective on Europe's contemporary identity politics.

This encyclopedia documents the presence and impact of nationalized cultural consciousness in European nationalism. It tracks how intellectuals, historians, philologists, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics, with effects that are still felt today. This new revised edition includes more than 100 additional articles, including coverage of memory culture as an aspect of Romantic nationalism and improved coverage of various cultural communities such as Czech, Finnish and Hungarian. Edited by Joep Leerssen, in cooperation with over 350 authors from dozens of countries, this encyclopedia gives a clear idea of the intricate (transnational and intermedial) networks and entanglements in which all aspects of Romantic Nationalism are connected.

This new revised edition includes more than 100 additional articles, including coverage of memory culture as an aspect of Romantic nationalism and improved coverage of various cultural communities such as Czech, Finnish and Hungarian.