Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been widely postulated for several decades now. This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. It gathers together essays that engage with objects of study ranging from poetry, prose, and political ideas to painting, porcelain, and popular song, and which draw on examples in Icelandic, Arabic, German, Irish, Hungarian, and French, among other languages. The contributors study transcultural phenomena from the medieval and early modern periods through to the modern and postmodern era, frequently challenging conventional periodizations and analytical frameworks based on the idea of the nation-state.

Marjet Brolsma is Assistant Professor in European Cultural History at the European Studies department of the University of Amsterdam. She has been a research assistant at the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN), and published on intellectuals and the Great War, national identity discourses and ideas of Europe.

Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Literary and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanian and Balkan social, cultural and literary history; on travel writing and circulation of ideas and images; and on European identity as a whole.

Krisztina Lajosi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She studies nationalism in a historical perspective. Her publications include Staging the Nation: Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary, Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe, and The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe.

Enno Maessen is lecturer in Political History at the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. He works on cultural representations, urban history and the history of contemporary Turkey. Maessen is co-founder of the Turkey Studies Network in the Low Countries.

Marleen Rensen is a senior lecturer in Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in literary engagement and life writing and has a particular interest in the lives of French and German artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Jan Rock is Assistant Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He teaches and publishes on cultural nationalism in the Low Countries, the history of Dutch philology, and cultures of reading. He is assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, edited by Joep Leerssen.

Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez is Associate Professor of European Literature and Culture in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in Spanish-Dutch-Anglo cultural exchanges in the early modern period and beyond. Her last edited volume is Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850) (2020)

Guido Snel is a writer and a senior lecturer teaching in the department of European Studies. He specializes in contemporary European literatures, with a specific focus on Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

List of Illustrations
Introduction – Of Networks, Narratives and Nations (Alex Drace-Francis)
ONE - National Questions
1. National Stereotypes in Early Modern Europe: Some Reflections (Peter Burke)
2. Constructed or Primordial? The European Nation State (Murray Pittock)
3. Nationalism and the Rhine: A Matter of Perspective? (John Breuilly)
4. Cultural Nationalism Beyond Europe: Genealogies of Mankind, Imperial Custodianships, and Anti-Colonial Resistance (John Hutchinson)
TWO - Networked Nations
5. Firebrand Folklore: Musical Memory and the Making of Transnational Networks (Ann Rigney)
6. The Nation as Network: Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov’s Islamic Biographies (Michael Kemper)
7. A Network in Search of an Alternative Modernity: Artists’ Colonies in Europe (1870-1914) (Anne-Marie Thiesse)
8. A Dutch Journal with a European Programme: De Muzen (Marita Mathijsen)
THREE - Canonicity and Culture
9. Cultural Nationalism and the Invention of Dutch Literary Icons (Lotte Jensen)
10. Colonial Legacies in European Folklore Studies (Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid)
11. The Canonization of the Artisan around 1900 (Eric Storm)
12. Sigur.ur Gu.mundsson and Jón Árnason’s Icelandic Folktales (Terry Gunnell)
13. Songs His Mother Taught Him: Émile Legrand’s Collection of Lacemakers’ Ballads (David Hopkin)
14. The Genesis of a National Product. Henry Havard and the Renewed Interest in Delftware, 1850-1920 (Jo Tollebeek)
FOUR - Historicity and Narrative
15. Travelling Westwards: Finding Europe in the Irish Middle Ages (Ann Dooley)
16. Finding Oneself within Germania: Karl Viktor Mühlenhoff’s Reading of Widsith (Tom Shippey)
17. The Faces of Crisis: Rethinking a Key Concept in View of the Transnational Intellectual History of Europe (Balázs Trencsényi)
18. The Extension of Traditions: King Stephen I of Hungary and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Krisztina Lajosi)
19. The Buried Tombstone, the Melting Iceberg and the Random Bullet. History, Memory and Antagonism in Ireland (R. F. Foster)
20. Reconstituting the European Historical Novel in Latin America: Mario Vargas Llosa in the Backlands of Brazil (Ina Ferris)
FIVE - Imagology, Identity and Alterity
21. The Shape of Things to Come: Thomas Pennant’s Tour of Ireland in 1754 (Mary-Ann Constantine)
22. Auto-Exoticism and the Irish Colonial Landscape: George Petrie’s Paintings of Clonmacnoise (1828) and Dún Aengus (1827) (Tom Dunne)
23. Ordinary Eyesight? Cultural Comparisons between Ireland and Wales (Claire Connolly)
24. European Constructions of the Asian East in the Novels of John Buchan (Michael Wintle)
25. Prerequisites to Study “Perceptions”: Empathy and Immunity to Nationalism (Hercules Millas)
26. Considerations of an Imagined Land (Manfred Beller)