How should we understand the rediscovered national epics such as the Lay of the Nibelungs, the Tale of Igorâs Campaign and the Kalevala? Were they simply monuments of the national past, or did new ideas about their meanings and possible roles emerge in the nineteenth century as an interconnected European phenomenon? If so, how did these connections work and why do they still matter today? Drawing on examples from Slavic literatures, music and the arts, the book shows how national epics helped shape modern European cultural identities â and why they remain symbols of enduring controversies that continue to demand memory work.
Contributors are: Tamás Berkes, Jean Boutan, Olga Äadajeva, Anna Cavazzoni, Mark-Georg Dehrmann, Dalibor Dobiáš, Andraž Jež, MichaÅ Kuziak, Pavla MachalÃková, Aleksandar PavloviÄ, and Aleksandra Wojda.
Dalibor Dobiáš is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is interested in Central European literatures, especially Romantic nationalism, history of literary criticism, and in multilingual authors.
Mark-Georg Dehrmann is Professor of Modern German and Comparative Literature at the Humboldt University, Berlin. His research interests include the history of the epic in the modern age, the history and theory of philology, and the theory of form and formalism.
The book is intended for specialists in Romantic nationalism in Europe, particularly historians of literature, music, art and science, scholars of Slavic studies and their students, as well as relevant academic libraries.