"This book raises awareness of Eurocentrism's enormous impact and shows how, over the course of five centuries, Eurocentrism has extended its power across the globe. By exploring a vast range of sources including Eurocentric maps and images, historiography, and Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, Wintle uncovers Eurocentrism's gradual evolution and reveals the ways in which it functions at both seen and unseen levels. Due to its multi- and interdisciplinary analysis, this book is an indispensable tool for both scholars and students concerned with modern history, politics, visual culture and political geography"--
Introduction : Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands and the historical imagination in the nineteenth-century: an introduction / Michael Wintle -- From Waterloo Field to Bruges-la-Morte. Historical imagination in the nineteenth -- Century / Niek van Sas -- The scope and language of national history. -- A very English affair? Defining the borders of empire in nineteenth-century British historiography / Andrew Mycock -- Who is the nation and what does it do? The discursive construction of the nation in Belgian and Dutch national histories of the romantic period / Marnix Beyen -- The colonies in the Dutch national museums for art and history (1800-1885) -- Three historical fiction and collective identity. -- 'Retro-fitting the past': literary historicism between the golden spurs and Waterloo / Joep Leerssen -- The Victorians, the Dark Ages and English national identity / Joanne Parker -- 'A true conception of history': 'making the past part of the present' in late Victorian historical romances / Anna Vaninskaya -- The past imagined in the visual arts. -- Picturing patriotism: the image of the artist-hero and the Belgian nation state, 1830-1900 / Jenny Graham -- A few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers: in search of the historical culture of Belgian immigrants in northern France, 1850-1914 / Saartje Vanden Borre and Tom Verschaffel -- 'Retracing the history of our country': national history painting and engraving in Britain and the Low Countries during the nineteenth century / Hugh Dunthorne
"The two concepts at the centre of this book: Europe, and the Second World War, are constantly changing in public perception. Now that 'Europe' is an even more contested idea than ever, this volume informs the current discourse on European identity by analysing Europe's reaction to the tragedy, heroism and disgrace of the Second World War"--
A tale of two battles: narrating Verdun and the Somme, 1916 / John Horne -- The stories the First World War inherited: adaptations of Napoleonic veterans' memoirs, 1814-1914 / Matilda Greig -- The archive as narrator? narratives of German "enemy citizens" in the Netherlands after 1945 / Marieke Oprel -- Of triumph and defeat: World War II and its historians in post-war Germany / Christina Morina -- The imagery of war: screening the battlefield in the twentieth century / Frank van Vree -- The war books controversy revisited: First World War novels and veteran memory / Dunja Dusanic -- War and peace as a "paradoxical coherence": how the European Union uses the remembrance of the Great War to construct European identities / Peter Pichler -- History wars in school textbooks? the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in Polish history textbooks since 1989 / Sylwia Bobryk -- "I was hurt and you were hurt too": the role of religion and competing narratives in the reconciliation process in Bosnia and Herzegovina / Marieke Zoodsma -- Hints of heroism, traces of trauma: trauma and narrative structure in interviews with Dutch and English international brigade volunteers of the Spanish Civil War / Tim Scheffe -- Digital survival? online interview portals and the re-contextualization of Holocaust testimonies / Susan Hogervorst -- Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen: anecdotes, humour and poetry as survival strategies / Evelien Gans.
Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe's terms and through European eyes; while this may not seem so unreasonable to Europeans, this perspective has unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that scientific modernity has diffused outwards from Europe to the benefit of the rest of the world, through colonialism and later development aid; it involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. This book brings together respected scholars from history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy, and from different geographical perspectives, who explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of Europe's past. The collection investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the 18th Century played in the construction of a Europeanist world view and the ways in which 'Europe' was constructed in literature and art
