Joep Leerssen

This article (originally delivered at the Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture, 22 March 2016) 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 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 instrumentalization is by no means inconsequential and should be analysed as an important feature of cultural nationalism, not only in Ireland.

Preprint of the article as published in Liam P. Ó Murchú (ed)., Amhráin Chearbhalláin / The Poems of Carolan: Reassessments (Irish Texts Society, 2007; Subsidiary series, 18), 30-42. On the simultaneity, within Carolan’s position and figuration, of [a] the antiquarian idea of “declining bards” and [b] the newly emerging professional virtuoso performer. This ambivalence is contextualized in an Irish society where public venues were as yet were practically unknown but convivial semi-private gatherings a strong social feature, and in a post-bardic poetics where the usual poetic mode was one of directly apostrophizing the poem’s subject.

Traces the rise and transnational diffusion of (non-classical) mythological studies in 19th-century Europe. Unable to establish itself as a proper scholarly discipline, mythological studies provided an important cultural-antiquarian background repertoire to nationally minded scholars and cultural nationalists.

A lecture read for the Coimbra Group of Research Universities, attempting, from the perspective of the Humanities, to respond to the current crisis in a managerial and efficiency-fixated university system, where research is increasingly outsourced to external funding agencies.

This paper (print-published as a pamphlet by NISE (Antwerp, www.nise.edu) periodizes Romantic Nationalism in the long 19th century and traces its post-1914 afterlife in "banal nationalism". Conversely, it argues that we can understand many instances of banal nationalism as the lingering residue of Romantic nationalism.

"Imagology" is the discursive and literary-historical study of national and ethnic stereotyping, as developed in Comparative Literature and now applied in various disciplines in the Humanities. This article identifies some emerging issues and future perspectives in imagology. As such it is a sequel/update to Joep Leerssen, «The rhetoric of national character: A programmatic survey», Poetics today, 21 (2000), 265–90.
This article is based on a lecture given to CRIMIC, the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Mondes Ibériques Contemporains, at the Sorbonne on 19 February 2016, and  is forthcoming in the online journal Iberic@l: Revue d’Études ibériques et ibéro-américaines, http://iberical.paris-sorbonne.fr/.

[…] rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum. Horatius, Epist. I.2, 42-43 European nationalism was born on the Rhine, that great faultline dividing and linking the twin cathedrals of French-dominated Strasbourg and Prussian-dominated Cologne, between 1792 and 1840. 1792 was the year of the Chant de guerre pour l 'Armée du Rhin (the Marseillaise), 1840 that of the Wacht am Rhein – both anthems which resounded down the decades with their call on the people-in-arms to protect the homeland against foreign invaders. Between 1792 and 1840, a crystallizing point was 1813, when Ernst Moritz Arndt defined, in prose and verse, both the territory and the frontier of Germany against French claims. The discourse of nationalism, its rhetoric and its propagandistic hold on public opinion and on state policy culminated in 1914, when hundreds of German and French academics threw their cultural and scholarly prestige into the propaganda war that vindicated each side in the unfolding World War. This discursive tradition spans the Battles of Valmy, Leipzig, Sedan and Verdun, and links them in a thematic and an intertextual continuity. Thematically, the texts in this tradition focus on the Rhine and the Rhineland, from Alsace to the Low Countries, as the core of a great European confrontation, which is not merely a geopolitical, but also a moral-anthropological one. The clashes over the Rhine are felt to involve, not states and their interests, but nations and their characters and moral identities. Intertextually, the arguments echo and reverberate from Arndt and the period of the Congress of Vienna (1813-15) to the writings of the Rhine Crisis of 1840, thence to the altercations surrounding the 1870-71 war, to come to the boil once more in 1914. (Secondary moments of intensification surround the Belgian Rebellion of 1830 and the Luxembourg Crisis of 1866-67.) This intertextual continuity deserves to be emphasized: the outbursts of writing activity punctuating the century from 1813 to 1914 are not each, separately, the individual reflection of the crisis of that particular moment (which is how these materials have usually been studied until now); on the contrary, they hang together as a discursive tradition in its own right and in the root sense of that term. Each author picks up issues and arguments from his predecessors in this pen-and-ink war, in which the moments of political crisis are merely pulsations. Indeed, the lingering cultural effect of each discursive stance (poem, song or pamphlet) exercises its influence, not only on subsequent authors, but also on public opinion in later political conflicts. Germans in 1840 recall the rhetoric of 1813; the rhetoric of 1870 recycles that of 1840 and of 1813; 1914, for all parties concerned, is a rerun of 1870. This textual echo-chamber gives continuity and adds intensity to the political conflicts which it helped shape and colour over the century. Seen in this light, the tradition of intellectuals and versifiers writing on behalf of their nation's interests constitutes an important historical factor in the development of nationalism. It establishes, over a century, an interface between the world of learning and the world of conflict and political propaganda. The case demonstrates, I think, that cultural mobilization is an enabling condition for the rise of political nationalism rather than a mere side-effect. Studying it as such can teach us much about the influence of nationalist thought on nationalist politics, and also about the rhetoric (meaning: the relationship between the inner convictions and the persuasive strategies) of nationalist discourse.