Bücher der Reihe Ideas beyond Borders

Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culturepresents a series of unexplored case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each demonstrating how travellers, scientists, Catholic missionaries, scholars and diplomats contributed to understandings of various global issues during the age of early globalization.

This book investigates how ideas of and discourses about Europe have been affected by images of the Mediterranean Sea and its many worlds from the nineteenth century onwards.Surprisingly, modern scholars have often neglected such an influence and, in fact, in most histories of the idea of Europe the Mediterranean is conspicuously absent. This might partly be explained by the fact that historians have often identified Europe with modernity (and the Atlantic world) and, therefore, in opposition to the classical world (centred around the Mediterranean). This book will challenge such views, showing that a plethora of thinkers, from the early nineteenth century to the present, have refused to relegate the Mediterranean to the past. Importance is given to the idea of a distinct 'meridian thought', a notion first set forth by Albert Camus and now reworked by French and Italian thinkers. As most chapters argue, this might represent an important tool for rethinking the Mediterranean and, in turn, it might help us challenge received notions about European identity and rethink Europe as the locus of 'modernity'.Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in European studies and Mediterranean history.

Modern Italian historiography has undergone a substantial revision in the last quarter of a century. From an almost exclusive focus on the process of nation-building, the attention of historians has shifted. The most innovative research is now devoted to assessing to what extent the cosmopolitan attitude that was evident in the late eighteenth century morphed, but did not disappear, in the ensuing two centuries.The essays in this volume make the case that the age of nations had a profound impact on Italian history and contributed to the creation of an Italian identity within the framework of well-functioning imperial and global networks. They also acknowledge that the process of national individualization carried with it a variety of aspects that reconnected Italian history to the foreign cultures that were undergoing constant self-fashioning.Cosmopolitan Italy in the Age of Nations: Transnational Visions from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century will be of interest to scholars throughout the world and intellectual and transnational historians.