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The Idea of Europe: A Critical History

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There is an increasingly widespread sense that Europe is in crisis. Notions of a shared European identity and a common European culture appear to be losing their purchase. This crisis is often seen as a conflict between a cosmopolitan and a nationalist idea of Europe. The reality is, however, considerably more complex, as the long history of the idea of Europe reveals. In The Idea of Europe: A Critical History, Shane Weller explores that history from its origins in classical antiquity to the present day. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he demonstrates that, all too often, seemingly progressive ideas of Europe have been shaped by Eurocentric, culturally supremacist, and even racist assumptions. Seeking to break with this troubling pattern, Weller calls for an idea of Europe shaped by a spirit of self-critique and by an openness to those cultures that have for so long been dismissed as non-European.

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  • Charts the history of the idea of Europe from its origins in classical antiquity through to the present day, with detailed analyses of how Europe was conceived in the Enlightenment, the Romantic period, the later nineteenth-century, the interwar years, and the post-war world
  • Reveals the extent to which the discourse on the idea of Europe has been shaped by profoundly Eurocentric, Euro-supremacist, and Euro-universalist tendencies, and has borne some striking similarities to nationalist discourses
  • Advocates some of the core values traditionally associated with European culture (including democracy, justice, tolerance, and secularism), while arguing that these values need to be complemented by a spirit of self-critique and humility
Author: Weller Shane
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages: 362
ISBN: 9781108478106
Cover: Hardback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2021

1. Myths of Europa: from Classical Antiquity to the Enlightenment
2. A Great Republic of Cultivated Minds:
1712–1815
3. Nationalism and Universalism:
1815–1848
4. The Russia Question
5. Homo Europaeus:1848–1918
6. The European Spirit:
1918–1933
7. A New European Order:
1933–1945
8. Unity in Diversity:
1945–1989
9. Other Europes
10. Europe Against Itself:
1989 to the Present Day.

Shane Weller is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His publications include Modernism and Nihilism (2011) and Language and Negativity in European Modernism: Toward a Literature of the Unword (2019).

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