This chapter investigates how ideological and political motivations prompted Italian Hegelians in the second half of the nineteenth century to posit a contrived identification between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, recognising in them a common revolutionary character. By focussing on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Giordano Bruno’s philosophy and Tommaso Campannella’s work, this chapter deals with ideas of modernity, interpretations of the Renaissance in nineteenth century Europe, and anticlericalism in the Risorgimento.

This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.

Why have we been so quick to dismiss late nineteenth-century Haitian novels in the field of francophone postcolonial studies? What have we failed to recognize as francophone or postcolonial in these texts? And how can we now begin to revisit them? This chapter proposes to answer these questions by drawing attention to the historical predicament that led nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals and writers to embrace the West’s narratives of civilization and modernity when such discourses were in fact integral to North Atlantic imperialisms and white supremacy. It first provides a historical overview of the Haitian novel from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to its booming production in the early 1900s. It then sheds light on Demesvar Delorme’s Francesca and Louis Joseph Janvier’s Une Chercheuse, two novels that help us understand how Haitian intellectuals sought to exist in a Eurocentric, international lettered sphere. Finally, it concludes by considering some of the ethical and intellectual challenges we must face in order to do justice to such works and their authors.

The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

The work of modernist poet and visual artist David Jones provides a retrospective vantage of the central claims of Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Jones saw the nineteenth century as a moment of breakage with the past. This rupture, according to Jones, threatens the work of the artist by depleting the sacramental meaning of reality – that is, the ability of concrete things to signify unseen spiritual depths. In both a dramatic biographical encounter with the Mass during his time on the front lines of World War I and in his subsequent art and poetry, Jones turns to liturgical forms to confront the breakage that began in the nineteenth century. Viewed from Jones’s perspective, the Romantic and Victorian interest in liturgy takes on new significance for the overarching genealogy of modernity and secularization. These liturgical fascinations intervene in – and resist – the long story of modernity’s separation of the material and spiritual, the natural and supernatural.

This chapter traces the ways familiar depictions of Ireland are interrupted when we consider some of the rare co-imaginings of Irish and Pacific islands. When watched alone, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) presents the non-modern in modern Ireland. But when watched alongside Moana (1926, Robert and Frances Flaherty), Man of Aran reveals the traveling nature of non-modern tropes, as the Pacific non-modern and the Irish non-modern coalesce. The transoceanic movement of the “novel savage” is emphasized, and the quintessentially Irish becomes recognizably interislander. By tracing the connections between Ireland and the Cook Islands in Kenneth Sheils Reddin’s Another Shore (1945), as well as Charles Crichton’s 1948 adaptation, we see that Reddin draws on the seeming incontrovertibility of the Pacific’s arcadia to establish, first, Dublin’s modernity, then Dublin’s non-modernity, then the erroneous, nebulous nature of such categories. By tracing the transnational movement of tropes and stereotypes across Ireland and the Pacific, area studies divisions collapse and we recognize Ireland as part of a global archipelago of islands of discounted, nascent, imbricated modernity.

This chapter shows how antisemitism built on Christian anti-Judaism, including blood libel accusations but also the appearance of Christian philosemitism. Documents show Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism as well as to the rise of nationalism and also benefited from Christian restorationism.

In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize the findings of the volume’s contributions and further develop the notion of the Weimar analogy as providing central clues about conceptions of modernity in the postwar era. It further emphasizes the multiple ways in which Weimar has been mobilized in different contexts, how it has worked as a cultural symbol, and why it has had such a profound impact on postwar political thinking in the West. The chapter, finally, expands on what we may take away from the studies in this volume for a more general understanding of the role of analogies and historical lessons for political thought.

The nature of culture and cosmologies, the role of utopian thinking in modern societies, and the limits of social change and activism.

A general introduction, with a description of the author’s intention, personal background, and approach.

Chapter 30 examines Goethe’s relationship with America. The country was for him an imagined space full of possibility, a historical frontier which opened onto modernity. The chapter considers the transatlantic network which, in the post-Napoleonic period, linked Harvard, Göttingen and Weimar, and would prove particularly important for Goethe’s geological studies. It also describes the – at times ambivalent – perspectives on American democracy that reached Goethe from Prince Bernhard, the son of Carl August, during his American travels, before moving to an analysis of American influences on and representations of America in Goethe’s literary work.

Chapter 35 examines Goethe’s awareness of the impact of human activity on the physical environment and his often prescient depictions of damage to natural systems. These are shaped by a range of perspectives and experiences, from Goethe’s work as a civil servant, to his scientific study, to his lifelong passion for nature. The chapter traces two themes in particular that run through his literary work: first, flooding, and second, fire and the destruction of forests. It also examines Goethe’s historical position, between the pre-industrial world and capitalist modernity.

Chapter 32 considers the question of modernity as explored in Goethe’s Faust. In his hands, the cast of mind of the restless central character constitutes an analogy of modernity. The chapter argues that the duo of Faust and Mephistopheles epitomises the mood of Goethe’s own time, which paved the way for the modern industrial era. It demonstrates that Part I radicalises the revolt against tradition which is an essential part of the original Faust legend, while Part II thematises incipient capitalist economics and the manipulation of nature through technology.

Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

The relationship between feminism and sexuality in the long twentieth century is both complex and multifaceted. Whether sexuality is understood as congenital or acquired, defined by object choice or aim, central to the character of an individual or the health of a population, it is a highly contested and contradictory set of discourses and institutional practices. Feminism is similarly impossible to define as a coherent ideology or political praxis. At once a historically specific political and cultural phenomenon emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, feminism is also a highly differentiated transnational event that belies a single origin, set of beliefs, or constituency. Organized around two key historical figures–the modern girl and the feminist-as-lesbian–this essay draws on feminist, queer, and historical studies of the world-wide feminist movements of the 1910s-1930s, and of the women’s liberation era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to trace the connections between the commodification and politicization of women’s sexuality as two axes around which the unsettled and generative relationship between modern sexuality and feminism revolves.