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Abstract
The partitions of Poland (finalised in 1795) brought about voices of horror and despair among the members of the political and intellectual elites of the defunct polity. But what was actually lost? Poland, the nation, Poles, the language? These terms existed in the political language, but their meaning was volatile. The expression of woe went before, or perhaps parallel, with the conceptualisation of a national idea: the nation, so to say, conceptualised itself in the process of being experienced, and in the consequence of being lost. Polish Ossianism, the main representative of which was the poem “Polish Bard” by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, is a good instance of this process. This chapter examines conceptual changes in the terms and concepts related to the nation-building process and in the forms of expressing emotions of the national belonging. A nation is not just constructed by the elites and then disseminated to the masses; it is simultaneously lost, felt, constructed, and disseminated – all are aspects of the same process. The gentle melancholy typical of the Enlightenment-sentimentalist mood co-exists with the classicist worship of the ancient patriotic virtues; both moods are visible in the great popularity that Virgil’s Aeneid enjoyed in early nineteenth-century Polish culture. Chronologically, the chapter covers the period from the last years before the fall of the old commonwealth until the 1830s, when the triumphant Romanticism transformed the patterns of political vocabulary, political philosophy, and emotional life.
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The article analyzes the ways in which the concept of Central Europe and related regional classifications were instrumentalized in historical research in Hungary, Poland and Romania. While Hungarian and Polish historians employed the discourse of Central Europe as a central means to contextualize and often relativize established national historical narratives, their geographical frameworks of comparison were nevertheless fairly divergent. the Hungarian one relating to the former Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian lands while the Polish one revolving around the tradition of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Romanian historians approached the issue from the perspective of local history, debating two alternative regional frameworks: the Old Kingdom, treated as part ofthe Byzantine and Ottoman legacies, and Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat that were shaped by the Habsburg project of modemity. In the Romanian context the debate on Central Europe reached its peak at a time when it lost re1evance in the Polish and Hungarian contexts. While conceding to recent critiques on the constructed and often exclusivist nature of symbolic geographical catcgories, the authors maintain the heuristic valuc of regional frameworks of interpretation as models of historical explanation transcending the nation-state at sub-national or trans-national level.
Abstract: The article analyzes the ways in which the concept of Central Europe and related regional classifications were instrumentalized in historical research in Hungary, Poland and Romania. While Hungarian and Polish historians employed the discourse of Central Europe as a central means to contextualize and often relativize established national historical narratives, their geographical frameworks of comparison were nevertheless fairly divergent, the Hungarian one relating to the former Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian lands while the Polish one revolving around the tradition of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Romanian historians approached the issue from the perspective of local history, debating two alternative regional frameworks: the Old Kingdom, treated as part of the Byzantine and Ottoman legacies, and Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat that were shaped by the Habsburg project of modernity. In the Romanian context the debate on Central Europe reached its peak at a time when it lost relevance in the Polish and Hungarian contexts. While conceding to recent critiques on the constructed and often exclusivist nature of symbolic geographical categories, the authors maintain the heuristic value of regional frameworks of interpretation as models of historical explanation transcending the nation-state at sub-national or trans-national level.