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The aim of this article is to shed light on the ways in which ideas of and discourses about Europe were influenced by some readings of war and war violence from the 1870s to the 1890s. This aim is pursued by considering the dichotomy progress/decadence, a crucial opposition for grasping images and notions of Europe as well as interpretations of warfare violence. The article focuses on the works of Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the young Paul Valéry at a time when, in intellectual and academic circles, there was an increasing fear of European decadence and degeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting restrictive collective policies imposed by a totalitarian EU regime of faceless Brussels bureaucrats. On the other hand, England seems to resurrect its imperialistic superiority against the purported democracy and horizontality of European institutions. Adopting the notion of “cultural intimacy”—with which Michael Herzfeld addresses the mutual engagement of contrasting positions in political and administrative practices—this paper addresses the equally stereotypical images of an indifferent, inhuman European bureaucracy and of an insular, cynical Great Britain in the works of Malcolm Bradbury and Tim Parks. Be it the allegedly liberal yet nationalistic stance of Thatcherist anti-Europeanism in Bradbury, or the British disaffection with the purported identitarian and cultural levelling within the common borders of the Schengen area and of the single currency, both authors’ symbolic constructions of European institutions and of British Euroscepticism are built as cultural entanglements of these two realities, and show the need to overcome the reductive conception of Europe as a failed super-state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to reconstruct and pinpoint the peculiarities of Ismail Kadare’s idea of Europe. Kadare’s idea of Europe, it is argued, differs from the ideas of Europe embraced or presumed by intellectuals like Paul Valéry, Georg Simmel, Danilo Kiš, Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, or Milan Kundera, or from that of the European Union. For Kadare it is literature rather than the polis or its particular ideology that is the guardian of European values. Thus the European legacy, in his view, is primarily Homeric rather than Socratic. I suggest first that the persecution of writers and the repression of literature in totalitarian regimes underlies Kadare’s idea of Europe. I then further characterize Kadare’s theme of persecution as a dialectic between regime and culture. Finally, I reconstruct Kadare’s narrative of Albania’s “return to Europe” as the struggle for recognizing Albania as the birthplace of European culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the political implications Goethe derived from his perception of Europe as an ailing civilisation shall be contrasted with democratic, romantic and conservative discourses about the continent in the aftermath of the French Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to this special issue arising from the January 2011 on early modern European identity taken from the interdisciplinary Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) Graduate Conference entitled "Imagining Europe. Perspectives, Perceptions and Representations from Antiquity to the Present," held in Leiden, Germany.

Today's European Union is keen to point out that one of Europe's main characteristics is its linguistic diversity. Some early-modern scholars, however, emphasised the notion of European monolingualism, even though Europe's linguistic diversity was as obvious in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as it is today. These scholars advanced the argument that, in a distant past, Europeans had spoken one single language. This article focuses on the first scholar to really substantiate this idea. In his voluminous Germania antiqua (1616), the Leiden founder of historical geography, Philippus Cluverius, set out to prove that Europe had once largely been populated by people who shared one single language and a set of distinctive customs. After analysing Cluverius' argument and his linguistic image of Europe, the article will outline the intellectual background behind his claims and map his work's impact on later representations of Europe in terms of language. Even when most early-modern scholars admittedly rejected the idea of Europe as a historical linguistic unity, the paper will show that the notion of Europe was a crucial point of reference in the linguistic scholarship of the early-modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender bending has been a staple of the medium of shōjo manga, Japanese girls’ comics, as best exemplified by cross-dressing “girl knight” characters and “Boys Love” stories, whose plots focus on romance between effeminate beautiful young men. The imaginary space created through the representation of these figures shares many traits in common with another typical feature of shōjo comics, namely their exoticisation of Europe. Both have been used as simultaneously escapist and subversive strategies, as a refuge from contemporary social norms and a platform for critical reflection. In this article, I aim to problematise our understanding of the connection between gender bending and exoticism in shōjo manga through an analysis of the representation of one specific aspect of European culture – namely, the Christian religion – in the genre of Boys Love manga. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A conference paper discussed during the 2005 "Writing Europe" conference is presented. It responds to Etienne Balibar's call for considering cultural metamorphosis by examining Europe of the imagination at the annual meeting of the Consortium of the Humanities Centers and Institutes on June 17-18, 2005 in Utrecht. Three word-pictures are used to demonstrate the author's argument for narrative vitality and the power of stories to influence life.

The author studies Robert Louis Stevenson's depiction of Holland in his book 'Catriona.' According to the researcher, the protagonist and narrator in Catriona travels to Leiden, Holland. The author states that the topography of Leiden in Stevenson's descriptions does not reflect reality. The author concludes that Stevenson based his depiction of Holland on literary sources while he had no sources of information on Leiden.

The article examines the narratology and poetics of the alliterative poem "Morte Arthure." The author suggests that the poem contains a series of covert structures, which can be articulated to provide revisions of the usual readings of the poem. He analyzes dialogical relationships and the possibilities of the chronotope. This means, according to the author, the use of textual mapping of time, which would yield the structural opposition of Britain and Europe to the poem.

Presents several books in the journal 'The European Legacy.' 'Hegel an Intellectual Biography,' by Horst Althaus; 'The History of Portugal,' by James M. Anderson; 'History and Theory in Anthropology,' by Alan Barnard.

The article focuses on the book by Lord Patrick Robertson, a lyric writer as well as a senator of the College of Justice at Aberdeen, Scotland. Robertson published a book titled "Leaves from a Journal," devoted to his extensive travels on the European continent. His account proved to be the earliest photographically illustrated book produced outside England, the first one to feature a photographic frontispiece and portrait. The front leaf of the copy in the author's collection is inscribed by Robertson to Dr. John Burt, president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The use of photographs as frontispieces became quite common around 1860 and remained popular into the late 1870s.