Vincent Everywhere: Van Gogh’s (Inter)National Identities

This book is a hybrid collection of authors from various disciplines - literature, art history, history, and media, cultural and literary studies - who examine the life and work of Vincent van Gogh and its multiple meanings within a broad range of (inter)national contexts. Vincent Everywhere offers the reader a journey through time, beginning in our own day with the meaning of Vincent van Gogh in the Netherlands of the twenty-first century, to the ways in which Van Gogh was embraced by Hollywood (and how European cinema resisted this appropriation), to the Franco-German struggle regarding the discursive ‘site’ of Van Gogh’s shoes, to the Japanese love affair with Van Gogh, to the problems the French have with the place of Van Gogh’s letters in their literary canon. The book ends with Van Gogh in his own time, the nineteenth century, examining his perception of his own foreignness as an immigrant in England, Belgium and France, and the early conflicts regarding the location (both literal and figurative) of his artistic legacy.