Rhine: National Tensions, Romantic Visions

Manfred Beller was Professor of German Language and Literature at the Italian Universities of Pavia, Messina, and Bergamo. He has published widely on German and Comparative Literature in the fields of Thematology and Imagology, including Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur literarischen Imagologie (Göttingen, 2006) and Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. A critical survey, ed. by M. Beller and J. Leerssen (Amsterdam – New York, 2007). Joep Leerssen is Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. His work deals with stereotypes of national character (Imagology, ed. w. Manfred Beller, 2007; www.imagologica.eu), romantic historicism, and the transnational history of cultural nationalism (National thought in Europe, 3rd ed., Amsterdam, 2010). He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (ernie.uva.nl; book edn. Amsterdam 2018).

• Introduction: The Rhine, Europe’s Frontier, Europe’s Dreamland: Transnational Destination, Inspiration, DisputationPart 1: Case Studies in Geopolitics, Romanticism and Travel1 Victor Hugo’s Le Rhin: French National Perspectives on a European RiverManfred Beller2 The Symbolical and Political Investment of the Rhine: A Dutch PerspectiveJoep Leerssen3 Italian Travellers in the Rhineland in the First Half of the Nineteenth CenturyGiovanna Cermelli4 English Middle-Rhine Tourism in Late-eighteenth and Nineteenth-century LiteratureHans Werner Breunig5 North American Travellers in the Rhine Valley: Revisions of Their Perspectives on the Landscape and on Sites of Memory in the Contested RegionWaldemar Zacharasiewicz6 Goethe’s Art Travels in the Rhine Regions 1814–1817 and His Concept of Decentralized CollectionsHelmut J. Schneider7 Restored Future: A Panorama of the Castles, Churches and Monuments on the Confluence of Rhine and NaheManfred Beller8 The Rhine as a Symbol: Aspects, Meanings and Functionalization of a Memory LandscapeElmar Scheuren9 The Walhalla: Bavarian Integration Monument, Germanic Hall of Fame, Expression of European PatronageReinhard BaumannPart 2: A History of Appropriations10 From the Meuse to the Rhine: A Disputed Region in French and German Atlases and EncyclopaediasManfred Beller11 The Never-ending Stream: Cultural Mobilization over the RhineJoep Leerssen12 Literary Appropriations of the Rhine: A German–French Repertory, 1814–1925

'This admirable book tells us what it was like before sanity prevailed.'John Fletcher in, Journal of European Studies 49 (3-4) 2019, p. 5-6.