Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

The ‘European project’ at first sight might seem a ploddingly pragmatic, even technocratic, instrument for achieving harmonisation between its member states. As such, it is habitually contrasted with the ‘nation-states’ which make up its members, and which, unlike the office blocks of Brussels and Strasbourg, are seen as historical communities (‘nations’) as well as states, united in their shared historical memories, language and culture. This unproblematic acceptance of the ‘nation-state’ makes for a skewed comparison when used in a problematisation of ‘Europe’. There seems to be little that Europe can offer by way of a common cultural bonding agent; at best, there is a notion of ‘unity in diversity’ (the official motto of the European Union (EU) since 2000). Indeed, the Treaty of Maastricht included a cultural paragraph which uneasily balanced the requirements of that cultural diversity and unity. The uncertainty concerning a common cultural basis is even seen as a characteristic weakness in the European project, something that deprives it of a centripetal, cohesive force. Its absence means that the EU is perpetually and self-consumingly in quest of a self-definition and, in Cris Shore’s formulation, lacks an identifying focus ‘to capture the loyalty and allegiance of its would-be citizens; to transform nationals into self-recognising European subjects’. Shore has also traced, in the mode of cultural anthropology, the corporate culture of the EU institutions, rather than analysing a cultural history or cultural agenda informing the European project.

A specific type of nationalism developed in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It differed from New World nationalisms (in the tradition of George Washington, Toussaint Louverture and Simón Bolívar) in a number of respects. It was spearheaded to a large extent by writers, artists, and intellectuals (in the fields of cultural production and knowledge production) rather than by political and popular activists; as such it affected existing states and newly emergent nations alike; and its main impact was through the reconceptualization of the state, its self-image, and its institutions, rather than through popular mobilization. Its main tenet – that the state should reflect, and indeed be defined by, the ethnocultural nationality of its inhabitants – was applied in the Peace Treaties of 1919 as an overriding principle in international law (the peoples’ right to self-determination) and still informs our current assumption that the default state is the “nation-state.”

Introducing the book’s scope and thematics, Parnell is here positioned in terms of Max Weber’s theory of charismatic leadership; the traumatic void left by his downfall and death is aligned with the rise of post–William Morris utopian reform movements.

The history of literary production in Ireland shows a traumatic cleavage between the Irish-Gaelic and English languages. The history of literary reception and canonicity shows, however, a bicultural literary continuum, constructed, from the early to mid-nineteenth century on, mainly by a tradition of anthologizing. This tradition still continues and incorporates both the production of scholarly text editions and poem collections for the general readership.

Comparing cultural developments in Ireland with European romanticism is problematic on a number of scores. The European periodisation of romanticism is broader than the English-derived start- and end-dates applied to Ireland; European surveys, in aggregating many exemplars from many different countries, create an unjustified impression of quantitative preponderance, against which background any small individual country would appear comparatively scant; and a proper European comparison should juxtapose Ireland with similar countries (imperial peripheries like Bohemia, Croatia, or Finland), rather than with imperial-metropolitan heartlands such as neighbouring France or England. This chapter attempts to correct these imbalances. Most importantly, it is argued that romanticism manifested itself, not only in the field of poetic production (to which its meaning is reduced nowadays), but also in the fields of cultural reflection and knowledge production; and it is in these fields that Irish developments are most closely analogous to European ones.

One of the classic texts of psychoanalytical literary criticism is Sigmund Freud's ‘Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva’ (1907). It addresses, as one might guess, a novella entitled Gradiva (with the subtitle Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück), which was published in 1903 by a German author called Wilhelm Jensen (1837-1911). Both the novella and its author have escaped oblivion largely thanks to Freud's sustained critical tour de force. It is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of the novella's fictional protagonist, the archaeologist Norbert Hanold. He is a withdrawn scholar, who keeps a plaster cast of an antique relief showing a walking woman (he nicknames her with the Latin epithet gradiva: she who strides forth) in his study. Something in her gait has a curious appeal for him:

A discipline is a working community of specialists: academics who apply a specific method to a specific corpus. Disciplines are much less stringently defined than specialisms. A discipline, as a working community, can bring very diverse types of specialists together. All they need to share, minimally, is a common field of interest, such as gender for women's studies, language for linguists, the past for historians, or Europe for European studies.

Unsurprisingly, such a working community with diverse specialisms will spend a lot of time trying to clarify and specify the nature of their common working ground. What is gender? What is language, and how does it work? What can we know, reliably and relevantly, about the past? And what does the ‘Europe’ in European studies stand for? Such self-questionings are the starting point of theory; all theories start in trying to explain what we think we are doing. Why do we consider certain things more important than others? What knowledge, what themes of interest, do we highlight or prioritize in our teaching programmes?

But there is also something else that binds disciplines and academic working communities together, and that is the human factor. Working communities are precisely that – communities: groups happy to share information, groups eager to communicate, to exchange ideas, to deliberate together. Working communities are about people sharing, not just a field of interest, but also a certain esprit de corps. The very different specialists assembled in these pages share, not only a general interest in things European or transnational, but also specific sense of collegiality and sympathy around the person of Michael Wintle.

Michael Wintle has for decades given guidance and leadership to the diverse, multispecialist discipline of European studies. Both within the departmental setting of Amsterdam and in the wider field, nationally and internationally, he has been a quiet, slightly reserved, but highly appreciated and authoritative figure in our deliberations and in our tentative trajectory towards something like a theory. His study of cartography, of Eurocentrism, of the interplay between cultural representation and power politics, have given us fruitful (and what is more: workable and sensible) ideas on what the ‘Europe’ in European studies stands for.