Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States

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This title is part of the CEU Press project to present the most important texts that triggered and shaped the processes of nation-building in Central and Southeast Europe. The aim is to confront ‘mainstream’ and seemingly successful national discourses with each other, thus creating a space for analyzing those narratives of identity which became institutionalized as national canons. It presents and illustrates the development of the ideologies of nation states, the modern successors of former empires. The sixty texts from a dozen east-European countries include manifestos, articles, poems or extracts from lengthy studies, written between mid-19th and early 20th centuries. They exemplify the relation between modernism and the creation of nation states. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of its author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective text was born. Why, modernism and not modernity? Modernity implies the West, while modernism was the product of the periphery. The editors use it in a stricter sense, giving it a place between romanticism and anti-modernism, spanning from the 1860s until the decade following World War I.