Cuchulain in the General Post Office:Gaelic revival, Irish rising

This article looks at the importance of the Gaelic language for the development of Irish nationalism in the decades leading up to, and following the Easter Rising of 1916. This importance was mainly symbolical: the Irish language was used mainly by revivalist activists, in a restricted number of functional registers, and largely as an enabling platform of other consciousness-raising activities. It is suggested, however, that such a symbolical instrumentalisation is by no means inconsequential and should be analysed as an important feature of cultural nationalism, not only in Irish history

Sua fata:History from a Book-Centered Perspective

The early decades of the 19th century witnessed, all over Europe, a surge of Romantic historicism which affected, not only the production of fresh texts, but also the (re-)discovery and edition of ancient ones. While this phenomenon spawned the paradigm of the “national literatures” across Europe, neither its transnational spread nor its receptive/productive dualism can be properly charted by the “national” literary historiography which emerged in its wake. A book-historical approach is here offered instead

Gods, Heroes, and Mythologists: Romantic Scholars and the Pagan Roots of Europe’s Nations

This article traces the scholarly interest in Europe’s non-Classical mythologies, from the rise of Edda studies in late eighteenth-century Denmark to the appropriation of Celtic origin myths in Spanish Galicia, and the flourish of overlapping Baltic mythologies between Tallinn and Vilnius, in the decades before 1900. Mythological studies attracted many important scholars (most notably Jacob Grimm, who published his benchmark Deutsche Mythologie in 1835), reached large readerships and inspired many artists, writers and composers. The progress and spread of this field of knowledge production is, however, extremely difficult to trace because it remained a cultural pursuit and never quite became a scholarly discipline. Its methods were heterogeneous and contradictory, combining the comparatist historicism of the New Philology with a tendency to leap from documentation to fanciful interpretation. The failure of the mythological pursuit to achieve academic consolidation stands in intriguing contrast to its popularity and its successful activation of a multinational repertoire of mythical figures and themes—sometimes reliably documented, often speculative, and always a welcome fuel for nationalist consciousness raising

Introduction

Political Culture and National Identit