From the “master of historical narrative” (Financial Times), a dazzling, richly detailed, panoramic work—the first to document the genesis of a continent-wide European culture. The nineteenth century in Europe was a time of unprecedented artistic achievement. It was also the first age of cultural globalization—an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming the barriers of nationalism and facilitating the development of a truly European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, the same books were being read across the continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played in homes and heard in concert halls, the same operas performed in all the major theatres. Drawing from a wealth of documents, letters, and other archival materials, acclaimed historian Orlando Figes examines the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange—they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures. As Figes observes, nearly all of civilization’s great advances have come during periods of heightened cosmopolitanism—when people, ideas, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations. Vivid and insightful, The Europeans shows how such cosmopolitan ferment shaped artistic traditions that came to dominate world culture.

"This wide-ranging and hugely ambitious book offers, for the first time ever, an integrated history of the culture produced and consumed by Europeans since 1800, and follows its transformation from an elite activity to a mass market - from lending libraries to the internet, from the first public concerts to music downloads."--BOOK JACKET.

In this significant intervention into the academic and institutional debate on European cultural identity, Monica Sassatelli examines the identity-building intentions and effects of the European Capital of Culture programme, and also looks at the work of the Council of Europe and the recent European Landscape Convention.

The study of culinary culture and its history provides an insight into broad social, political and economic changes in society. This collection of essays looks at the food culture of 40 European countries describing such things as traditions, customs, festivals, and typical recipes. It illustrates the diversity of the European cultural heritage.

This third, revised and augmented edition of Peter Rietbergen’s highly acclaimed Europe: A Cultural History provides a major and original contribution to the study of Europe. From ancient Babylonian law codes to Pope Urban’s call to crusade in 1095, and from Michelangelo on Italian art in 1538 to Sting’s songs in the late twentieth century, the expressions of the culture that has developed in Europe are diverse and wide-ranging. This exceptional text expertly connects this variety, explaining them to the reader in a thorough and yet highly readable style. Presented chronologically, Europe: A Cultural History examines the many cultural building blocks of Europe, stressing their importance in the formation of the continent’s ever-changing cultural identities. Starting with the beginnings of agricultural society and ending with the mass culture of the early twenty-first century, the book uses literature, art, science, technology and music to examine Europe’s cultural history in terms of continuity and change. Rietbergen looks at how societies developed new ways of surviving, believing, consuming and communicating throughout the period. His book is distinctive in paying particular attention to the ways early Europe has been formed through the impact of a variety of cultures, from Celtic and German to Greek and Roman. The role of Christianity is stressed, but as a contested variable, as are the influences from, for example, Asia in the early modern period and from American culture and Islamic immigrants in more recent times. Since anxieties over Europe's future mount, this third edition text has been thoroughly revised for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moreover, it now also includes a 'dossier' of some seventeen essay-like vignettes that highlight cultural phenomena said to be characteristic of Europe: social solidarity, capitalism, democracy and so forth. With a wide selection of illustrations, maps, excerpts of sources and even lyrics from contemporary songs to support the arguments, this book both serves the general reader as well as students of historical and cultural studies.

Culture is one of the most complex and contested fields of European integration. This book analyzes EU cultural politics since their emergence in the 1980s with a particular focus on the European Capital of Culture program, the flagship of EU cultural policy. It discusses both the central as well as local levels and contextualizes EU policies with programmes of other European organisations, such as the Council of Europe. By asking what "Europe" actually means for European cultural policy, the book goes beyond the confines of official organizations and the political sphere, to discuss the contribution, impact and appropriation among a more diverse group of actors and participants, such as transnational experts, local bureaucrats, cultural managers, urban dwellers and the visitors. Its principal aim is to debunk the myth of Brussels as the centre of cultural Europeanization. Instead, it argues that European cultural policy has to be seen as a relational, multi-directional movement, involving a wide variety of stakeholders and leading to conflicts and collaborations at various levels. This book combines the perspectives of political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians, at the intersection between EU, urban, and cultural studies, and changes our understanding of ‘Europeanization’ by opening up new empirical and conceptual avenues. Challenging the dominant interpretation of European cultural policies, The Cultural Politics of Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of European studies, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians and cultural studies.

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The cultural borders of Europe are today more visible than ever, and with them comes a sense of uncertainty with respect to liberal democratic traditions: whether treated as abstractions or concrete realities, cultural divisions challenge concepts of legitimacy and political representation as well as the legal bases for citizenship. Thus, an understanding of such borders and their consequences is of utmost importance for promoting the evolution of democracy. Cultural Borders of Europe provides a wide-ranging exploration of these lines of demarcation in a variety of regions and historical eras, providing essential insights into the state of European intercultural relations today.

International exchange in European cultural life in the 19th and 20th centuries From the early nineteenth century till the middle of the twentieth century, cultures in Europe were primarily national. They were organized and conceived of as attributes of the nation states. Nonetheless, these national cultures crossed borders with an unprecedented intensity even before globalization transformed the very concept of culture. During that long period, European cultures have imported and exported products, techniques, values, and ideas, relying on invisible but efficient international networks. The central agents of these networks are considered mediators: translators, publishers, critics, artists, art dealers and collectors, composers. These agents were not only the true architects of intercultural transfer, they also largely contributed to the shaping of a common canon and of aesthetic values that became part of the history of national cultures. Cultural Mediation in Europe, 1800-1950 analyses the strategic transfer roles of cultural mediators active in large parts of Western Europe in domains as varied as literature, music, visual arts, and design. Contributors Amélie Auzoux (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), Christophe Charle (Université Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne), Kate Kangaslahti (KU Leuven), Vesa Kurkela (University of the Arts, Helsinki), Anne O’Connor (University of Galway), Saijaleena Rantanen (University of the Arts, Helsinki), Ágnes Anna Sebestyén (Hungarian Museum of Architecture, Budapest), Inmaculada Serón Ordóñez (University of Málaga), Renske Suijver (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), Tom Toremans (KU Leuven), Dirk Weissmann (Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès)

Despite the fact that, if only by number, small and peripheral cities played an important role in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European print culture, book history has mainly been dominated by monographs on individual big book centres. Through a number of specific case studies, which deploy a variety of methods and a wide range of sources, this volume seeks to enhance our understanding of printing and the book trade in small and peripheral European cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to emphasize the necessity of new research for the study of print culture in such cities.