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The article explores the political views of poet T. S. Eliot particularly his interest in Eastern Europe following World War I. Topics discussed include the way the political situation in the region served as inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land," the stereotypes commonly associated with Eastern Europe such as its rising nationalism and cultural heterogeneity, and the distinction between his conceptualization of Eastern Europe and the Central Europe of Vienna, Austria.

A literary criticism is presented that focuses on the novel "Europe in Autumn," by Dave Hutchinson. Topics include his use of an imagined version of a fractured Europe with ever-changing national borders, the xenophobic tendencies of imagined communities, and mapmaking as a technology of border protection.

The implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2004 was an instrument established to achieve a rapprochement between the countries of Eastern Europe and the Southern Mediterranean with the European Union. Since this common policy began, it has evolved very differently in the distinct countries that are part of it. One such country is Ukraine, which has developed special relations with the European Union. So much so that, since the implementation of a specific dimension called the Eastern Partnership in 2009, relations have been fluctuating between Ukraine and the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Hans Christian Andersen is well known as a writer of fairy tales, but a corpus of travel books also constitutes a large part of his literary heritage. Influenced by the poetics of the novel, the focus of travel books shifted from images of foreign countries, landscapes and descriptions of unusual situations, to the inner world of the traveller, which might be more interesting for a reader than the external world. The narrator thus becomes the protagonist of the tale, bringing such travel books closer to fiction. It is argued that Andersen's fairy tale poetics has its roots in his travel books. These books include many stories, each of which could be considered a separate text. The first book, Skyggebillede (1831), was based on his trip to Germany and contains a number of small narratives similar to fairy tales published after 1835. Here, Andersen transformed the traditional form of travel book, with his poetic vision of Germany more important than reality, which was only the background for the author's fantasy. His later travel books, En digters bazar (1842) and I Sverige (1849), contain texts which were included in Andersen's collections of fairy tales and stories. Here, his images of European cities, nature and other famous sites are not mere descriptions but also romantic pictures where fairy tale fantasy plays a very important role. [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 first section of the View is widely understood to be influenced by the twelfth-century texts of Gerald of Wales, as transmitted by Richard Stanyhurst in his Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland included in Holinshed (1577). These works describe the Norman intervention in Ireland as a civilizing process. Such an identification of sources is problematic, however, because the ultimate purpose of the View was to discredit Stanyhurst's argument that Irish-born descendants of the Norman conquerors of Ireland (the so-called "Old English") should complete that task. This case of problematic sourcing is resolved given that Stanyhurst's original text reappeared in the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicle accompanied by some translations from the writings of Gerald of Wales made by John Hooker (an English Protestant antiquarian), and also by Hooker's own History of Ireland 1546-86, wherein Hooker attributes the disturbed condition of the country to the recalcitrance of Old English lords. This, for Hooker, and also for Spenser, proved that the Irish population of English descent was in greater need of reform than their Gaelic neighbors. Given that this was the novel argument of the View, and given close echoes between Hooker's description of famine in Munster and similar passages in the View, Hooker's contribution to the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicle is arguably the most potent influence on Spenser's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

First, this article focuses on the question of how the historiography on Eastern European in German-speaking countries reflected on questions of space and territoriality before the appearance of the spatial turn. Second, it gives an insight into recent trends in this field of research and summarizes the most important works on the modern history of East Central Europe that can be placed in this context. It comes to the conclusion that it would be too much to say that the debates that emerged since the late 1990s on Eastern Europe in Germany had anticipated already the main elements of the recent spatial turn. From today's perspective, however, significant transfer potential can still be identified, also because discussions within German East European history did not find their way into more general historical debate (with only some exceptions like studies related to the question of boundaries). The complex historical development of East-Central Europe in particular offers enough material for impulses that can be ideally transmitted in connection with the core theories of the spatial turn. [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 literary critique is presented of the 19th-century American novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," by Mark Twain. Subjects explored include its thematic engagement with European ideology, examples of Twain's influence from Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the concept of escape and evasion seen in the narrative.

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.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the controversial Austrian author of the erotic novella "Venus in Furs" (1877), is little known for his distinctive political utopianism. Yet, he espouses a paradoxical German-language Pan-Slavism in many of his novellas and political essays. His "opus magnum" Vermächtnis Kains (1870-77) depicts as natural determinism fierce ethnic conflicts within the para-colonial space of Eastern Europe. In fact, conflict is the pre requisite of his utopian pan-Slavic community in Eastern Europe. In his novellas "Kapitulant" and "Paradies am Dniester," discussed in this essay, Sacher-Masoch creates a discourse on utopian space that delivers its message through its suspension in fantasy denying the spatial realities and political limitations of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an introduction to the various articles provided in the issue focusing on "the idea of Europe" which was first presented at a conference in Berlin to define what "the idea of Europe" meant to her. It is told of the hardships and destruction of Europe over the many years and how what little is left should be preserved. The people should live with the memory of what could be so that Europe can be rebuilt to become a better place for all.

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.