Presentations of National Cultures. Fifty-one texts illustrate the evolution of modernism in the east-European region. Essays, articles, poems, or excerpts from longer works offer new opportunities of possible comparisons of the respective national cultures, from the different ideological approaches and finessing projects of how to create the modern state liberal, conservative, socialist and others to the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities.

Fifty-one texts illustrate the evolution of modernism in Eastern Europe. Essays, articles, poems, or excerpts from longer works offer new opportunities of possible comparisons of the respective national cultures. The volume focuses on the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities. Often outspokenly critical of the romantic episteme, these texts reflect a more sophisticated and critical stance than in the preceding periods. At the same time, rather than representing a complete rupture, they often continue and confirm the romantic identity narratives, albeit with "other means". The volume also presents the ways national minorities sought to legitimize their existence with reference to their cultural and institutional peculiarity.

The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of "antimodernism". In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist models of social existence, emphasizing the role of the elites (and charismatic leaders) shaping the whole body politic. Along these lines, antimodernist authors also formulated alternative visions of symbolic geography: rejecting the symbolic hierarchies that focused on the normativity of Western European models, they stressed the cultural and political autarchy of their own national community, which in some cases was also coupled with the reevaluation of the Orient. At the same time, this antimodernist turn should not be confused with rightwing radicalism—in fact, the dialogue with the modernist tradition was often very subtle and the anthology also contains texts which offered a criticism of 'modern' totalitarianism in an antimodernist key.

How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

Because gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone testifies of its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. Thus, the gramophone points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.

67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.

Turbo-folk music is the most controversial form of popular culture in the new states of former Yugoslavia. Theoretically ambitious and innovative, this book is a new account of popular music that has been at the centre of national, political and cultural debates for over two decades. Beginning with 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia, Uroš Čvoro explores the cultural and political paradoxes of turbo-folk: described as ’backward’ music, whose misogynist and Serb nationalist iconography represents a threat to cosmopolitanism, turbo-folk’s iconography is also perceived as a ’genuinely Balkan’ form of resistance to the threat of neo-liberalism. Taking as its starting point turbo-folk’s popularity across national borders, Čvoro analyses key songs and performers in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. The book also examines the effects of turbo on the broader cultural sphere - including art, film, sculpture and architecture - twenty years after its inception and popularization. What is proposed is a new way of reading the relationship of contemporary popular music to processes of cultural, political and social change - and a new understanding of how fundamental turbo-folk is to the recent history of former Yugoslavia and its successor states.