Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied. High and low culture as texts embedded in the texture of memory, as well as material culture as a communal receptacle and reservoir of memory are analysed in their historical contingency. Symbolic representations of accepted and counter history/ies, and the cultural nodes and mechanisms of the cultural imaginary are also issues of central interest. Twenty-six contributions tackle these topics from a theoretical and historical perspective and bring to the fore case studies illustrating the interdisciplinary agenda that underlies the volume.
Contributors: Luis Manuel A.V. Bernardo, Lina Bolzoni, Peter Burke, Pia Brinzeu, Adina Ciugureanu, Thomas Docherty, Christoph Ehland, Herbert Grabes, László Gyapay, Donna Landry, Christoph Lehner, Gerald MacLean, Dragoş Manea, Daniel Melo, Mirosława Modrzewska, Rareş Moldovan, C.W.R.D. Mosely, Petruţa Năiduţ, Francesca Orestano, Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Andreea Paris, Leonor Santa Bárbara, Hans-Peter Söder, Jukka Tiusanen, Ludmila Volná, Ioana Zirra.
Professor Mihaela Irimia teaches 18th-century and Romantic British literature and cultural theory at the University of Bucharest, where she is Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity. She has published extensively and organized international conferences.
Dragoş Manea is assistant lecturer at the University of Bucharest, where he teaches seminars in British and American literature, and academic writing. His main research interests include the adaptation of history, cultural memory, and the relationship between ethics and fiction.
Andreea Paris is assistant lecturer at the University of Bucharest. She teaches English, contemporary literary theory, as well as eighteenth and twentieth century British literature. Other academic interests include cultural memory, postmodernist theories and literatures and reader response criticism.
Students and academics, in the fields of Critical Studies, Literature and Culture, as well as those interested in and the topical and highly interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies.