It is common to think of nationalism as a modern, secular form of identity that supplanted the influence long exercised by universalistic religions in shaping conceptions of temporal authority, membership, rights or privileges, and obligation in human societies. Under stereotypically modern conditions, religion is supposed to be largely confined to its own spiritual sphere, operating on a separate plane from that of the national. Yet the chapters in Part ii have shown how much more complicated the relationship between transcendentally transnational and boundedly national frameworks of belief and belonging can be. They are shown to operate not on separate, parallel planes, but as fields of belief and action that intersect, converge, and shape – as well as clash with – one another in myriad ways.

The constitutional dimension of the European Union (EU) has to account for the fact that the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (TECE) seems to have failed in 2005 in the Dutch and French referenda. Thus we are unlikely to have a legal document officially called a ‘constitution’ in the foreseeable future. Yet, the designation is not decisive on its own (cf. the German Grundgesetz or the Hungarian Basic Law). Treaties can also be constitutions, as the examples of Cyprus (1960, Treaty of Establishment),1 the Constitution of Württemberg (1819), the Constitution of Saxony (1831)2 and the Norddeutsche Bund (1867) show.

Focussing on the 1820s and 30s, traditionally seen as transitional decades when many leading Romantic writers passed away, Chapter Fifteen analyses the effects of politics and of the cultural marketplace on literary production, arguing for a late-Romantic episteme recognisable in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. After discussing some of problems inherent in the concept of late Romanticism, the author defines it as a series of cultural practices including improvisation, speculation, and performance that reflect the transitory nature of the period. This has been alternately labelled in German literary history as Spätromantik, Biedermeier, and Vormärz, none of which perfectly correspond. Informed by recent research in book and media history, the chapter discusses periodicals’ role in shaping the literary field, in particular Costumbrismo in Spain. These new forms of experimental and ephemeral writing reflect the period’s intense commercialism and consciousness of time, which contrast with the Romantic desire for transcendence. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s last story, ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ [My Cousin’s Corner Window], Walladmor, a satirical hoax in imitation of Walter Scott, and Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, serve as examples of late-Romantic tendencies.

The historiography on politicized ethnicities in Southeast Asia has for a long time gone hand in hand with the story of nationalism. Colonial rule was believed to have introduced the kinds of registers that stemmed from the Enlightenment into non-Western societies. Colonial ethnographers divided up populations by languages and culture, sometimes deciding that one or another embodied the genuine national identity. Benedict Anderson, working with indigenous literature and new research on the Southeast Asian geobody, introduced the notion that nationalism was a socially constructed political community. Like religious communities, it was an imagined community, in that any one member felt they were part of a larger, horizontal group whose full membership transcended their personal acquaintance.

Development policy is currently one of the pillars of external action of the European Union (EU). The volume of official development assistance disbursed by the EU and its member states makes the EU one of the world’s largest donors. Despite its significance today, development assistance was not discussed in the meetings of the Spaak Committee in 1955–6 and was only later placed on the table during negotiations for the EEC Treaty.

Michael Howard maintains that most nation-states that came into existence before the mid-twentieth century were created by war or had their boundaries defined by wars or internal violence.1 The role of war, however, has been neglected in theories of nationalism, which tend to focus on the rise of nations and nation-states as a recent phenomenon generated by various forms of modernization. This comment does not apparently apply to the work of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, who draw on the historiography of the European early modern “military revolution.”2 Military innovations, they argue, meant that success in warfare required an efficient process of fiscal extraction (taxes), which in turn was dependent on the development of a centralized state administration. Even in these accounts, however, nationalism and nations were relatively late derivatives of these modern processes, emerging in response to state centralizing pressures in the late eighteenth century.

After addressing Germaine de Stäel’s ‘invention’ of European Romanticism in On Literature and On Germany, the introductory chapter explains the editorial choices behind the collection, including its expansive time frame, European focus, and comparative method. It then surveys Lord Byron’s continental reception to demonstrate the utility of a pan-European approach. Although extremely familiar, the case of Byron and of Byronism is of central importance to the history of European Romanticism because of the European role that it gave to British literature, but also because it brings to the fore some common problems raised when using Romanticism as a critical category. The next section looks at how literary historians have addressed these problems, then discusses some of the period’s most salient features. The final part provides a chapter by chapter synopsis in order to help readers navigate the volume.

The principal theories of European integration (neo-functionalism, intergovernmentalism and social constructivism) have been rather silent about the presence and role of the religious factor in the process of unification of Europe. Such an approach, based on a certain underestimation of religion, seems to be unjustifiable nowadays, since it has become evident that the religious component of European integration appears in various forms and formats. For instance, some Protestants regard this integration as a religious ‘plot’, usually of the Roman Catholic Church, aiming at the construction of a new European Catholic empire and the undermining of Protestantism. Also, the religious dimension was one of the most controversial and fiercely debated issues at the time of drafting the European Constitution, namely the inclusion in the text of the reference to the Christian inheritance of Europe, or the reference to God. The religious or religion-related arguments played an important role in the debates on the EU membership of the largest ‘newcomer’ of the 2004 enlargement (Poland), and in the discussion in Ireland on the referendums on the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 and 2009. Finally, the importance of religion has been confirmed in the referendums on EU membership, including the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum in the United Kingdom.

It is therefore pertinent to claim that the presence of religion, or, to be more precise, Christian Churches, in the process of European integration is not disputable; we can only discuss how this presence has been seen, analysed and interpreted. This is addressed in chapter 26, in accordance with the following structure. First I discuss how the role of Churches in European integration has been described in the relevant literature. Then I analyse the role of Churches at the beginning of integration, in terms of their role as non-state actors and identity formers, as well as the Churches’ influence and their presence at supranational level. The final pages of this chapter have been devoted to the discussion of the practical cooperation of the Churches and EU institutions.

This chapter identifies habitat as a crucial concept for literary animal studies. Habitat, as a biological concept, is compared with Jakob von Uexküll theory of Umwelt, a given organism’s subjective experience of inhabiting its distinct territory. Both terms are important for animal studies because they enable us to attend to the material and perceptual life worlds of wild creatures, ways of living threatened by habitat loss and climate change. I consider the distinct imaginative work of evoking habitat as a literary setting, discussing four literary works – John Clare’s poetry, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” – that connect human self-awareness with careful attention to the particular ways in which different species of animals dwell in the world.

This chapter accounts for how animals appear in Victorian literature in connection with two overarching themes: shifting definitions of the animal and the human, especially in relationship to racialization and empire, and the incorporation of animals into the political sphere, especially as they proliferate throughout daily life. Both themes offer a productive and foundational lens to analyze the vast representations of animals across Victorian literature, and relate to a variety of other topics such as care and control, domesticity and the family, class and gender, and imperial strategies. Through examining a range of genres, from realist texts and animal autobiography to travel narratives and the literature of empire, this chapter demonstrates how relationships with animals shifted how Victorians saw themselves, their animals, and those across the empire. The chapter argues that texts by authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anna Sewell, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schriener, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Kingsley, and Richard Marsh, among others, illuminate the broader implications of extending political care to animals, controlling them across the empire, and using them to account for human difference through demarcating racial categories and structuring the borders of the human.

Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.

European integration is not the result of a preconceived plan. It rather consists of messy procedures and heated discussions. Ad hoc decision-making, crises and even utter chaos have been constants in the history of the European Union (EU). This complex reality has induced scholars to zoom in on its infamous ‘muddling through’ to better understand what is going on in European integration. Consequently, the primary focus of research has been on ways, means and outcomes: inter-state bargaining, and the resulting treaties and European institutions. However, this focus on institutional ways and means, and on the outcomes of inter-state bargaining, has implied that ideas about Europe’s future mostly have been treated as proxies of specific, rather one-dimensional, state, or institutional, interests. This leads to distorted images of history. If the recent crisis years made one thing very clear, it is this: that it proves quite complex to adequately analyse the multilevel, multipolicy and demoi-cracy muddling through that characterises the EU’s laborious management of crises and day-to-day politics and policies, let alone that a mere focus on institutional interests would be sufficient.