Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past

Joep Leerssen is chair of modern European literature at the University of Amsterdam and is director of the Huizinga Institute (the Dutch Research Institute for Cultural History). His work on the links between literature and nationalism includes Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (1997), Nationaal Denken in Europa: Een cultuurhistorische schets (1999), and Hidden Ireland, Public Space (2002). He is currently coordinating a large comparative project on philologists and national thought in nineteenth-century Europe.