Charismatic Nations

A Cultural History of Nationalism in Europe from 1800 to the Present

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At the core of nationalism, the nation has always been defined and celebrated as a fundamentally cultural community. This pioneering cultural history shows how artists and intellectuals since the days of Napoleon have celebrated and taken inspiration from an idealized nationality, and how this in turn has informed and influenced social and political nationalism. The book brings together tell-tale examples from across the entire European continent, from Dublin and Barcelona to Istanbul and Helsinki, and from cultural fields that include literature, painting, music, sports, world fairs and cinema as well as intellectual history. Charismatic Nations offers unique insights into how the unobtrusive soft power of nationally-inspired culture interacts with nationalism as a hard-edged political agenda. It demonstrates how, thanks to its pervasive cultural and 'unpolitical' presence, nationalism can shape-shift between romantic insurgency and nativist populism.
This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

• This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core
• Offers, with many telling examples from different art-forms and media, an interdisciplinary historical survey of cultural nationalism
• Enhances a comparative and transnational awareness of how nationalism migrates between different national communities and countries
• Presents how cultural nationalism interacts with social and political activism