Robert Pyrah - Re-contextualising East Central European History: Nation, Culture and Minority Groups

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, scholarship on East Central Europe has adopted mainstream western methodologies, but remains preoccupied with a narrow range of themes. Nationalism, identity, fin-de-sicle art and culture, and revisionist historiography dominate the field to the detriment of other subjects. Using a variety of lenses - literary, political, linguistic, medical - the authors address a conspectus of original themes, including Jewish literary life in interwar Romania; the Galician Alphabet War; and Saxon eugenics in Transylvania. These case studies transcend their East Central European context by engaging with conceptually broad questions. Additionally, the volume provides a synopsis of recent historiographic developments in East Central Europe in the Foreword, an Afterword by Professor Robert J. W. Evans, and a topical bibliography of use to both students and researchers. This volume has its roots in an interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Oxford, bringing together emerging and established scholars, with the explicit aim of broadening the study of this region, its history and culture beyond the established paradigms. Robert Pyrah, a Junior Research Fellow of St. Antonys College, Oxford, is a specialist on theatre and cultural politics in the post-Habsburg context; Marius Turda is founder of the Working Group on the History of Race and Eugenics based at Oxford Brookes University. Book jacket.