"The Rhine: National tensions, Romantic visions" now out

Edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, and the fruit of a series of SPIN workshops, the book has appeared in Brill’s European Studies series. One of the first English-langage historical surveys of the transnational, especially German-French entanglements and confrontations over this European geographical and cultural core region, brings together eminent literary and cultural specialists and present materials and analyses from various perspectives – literature, tourism, heritage, geopolitics.

Of all European landscapes and regions, the Rhine is one of the most heavily overlaid with cultural and political meaning. Cradle of Romanticism, tourism, and the picturesque, bone of contention between the German and French spheres of cultural and geopolitical influence, the Rhine has attracted armies, artists, activists and tourists for centuries and has featured prominently the key writings of Europe’s literary and intellectual history from Byron to Lucien Febvre.

The volume also contains a unique and comprehensive anthology of key texts (historical, poetical and polemical) related to the Rhineland and its contested position. More information here.

Latest Blog Posts

Schlegel letters visualized

Stefan

Our colleagues in Germany who have prepared a fine online edition of the correspondence of A.W. Schlegel — august-wilhelm-schlegel.de — have kindly allowed us acccess to the metadata of this corpus (5300 letters). Stefan Poland has ingested these into the ERNiE interface and the ERNiE network visualization is now online. A geographical visualization can be found at https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/59/scenario/75/geo/ and a social visualization can be found at https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/59/scenario/188/soc/ .

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Bibliography of Romantic Nationalism now online

A searchable Bibliography of Romantic Nationalism has come online on the ERNiE website (ernie.uva.nl). At present it contains 4700 titles; we shall be expanding it further in the months ahead. Like ERNiE itself, the bibliography is in the form of an online database. It is searchable by cultural community and/or by cultural current, or browsable by keyword, allowing users to filter for specific subsets that are useful for their research interests.
Clicking a title in the bibliographical list brings up a publication’s full data in formatted form, and allows you to identify (under the "references" tab) to which ERNiE article(s) this publication is linked.
The Bibliography also includes two newly added features:

  • a sorting button allows you to sort the search results list according to your preferences (using author, year, cultural current and/or cultural community as primary, secondary etc.sorting criteria)
  • a download button will export the search results in .ODT format - a formatted text file format which can be openend in all current word processing software on all operating systems.
  • Full instructions are in the ERNiE Users’ Manual on this site.

We have given the Bibliography its own URL, which we hope the research community will find useful: http://biblio.ernie.uva.nl
We are grateful for suggestions for completing the bibliography’s coverage. Please use the feedback form on this site.

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CfP conference "Religious Dimensions of Nationalism", Venice, November 2020

SPIN will co-organize a conference on “Religious Dimensions of Nationalism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”, to be held 26-28 November 2020 in Venice at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Nationalism and religion are deeply entangled, not only in the crossover field of “political / secular religion” but by way of charismatic leadership, prophetism, messianism, millennialism, and more generally mysticism, esotericism and alternative spirituality. The concept of a divine covenant with a “chosen people” takes new shapes in nationalist, but also imperialist and colonialist, discourses. And the global spread of nationalism, and its role in the decolonization process, is often far from merely secular; indeed alliances with religious fundamentalism are now a prominent feature.
The conference aims at bringing together scholars coming from different disciplines who are interested in this entangled relationship. The full Call for Papers is online here.

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