Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture


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This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.




The Athenaeum


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From Revolt to Riches


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This collection investigates the culture and history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from both international and interdisciplinary perspectives. The period was one of extraordinary upheaval and change, as the combined impact of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolt resulted in the radically new conditions – political, economic and intellectual – of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. While many aspects of this rich and nuanced era have been studied before, the emphasis of this volume is on a series of interactions and interrelations: between communities and their varying but often cognate languages; between different but overlapping spheres of human activity; between culture and history. The chapters are written by historians, linguists, bibliographers, art historians and literary scholars based in the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States. In continually crossing disciplinary, linguistic and national boundaries, while keeping the culture and history of the Low Countries in the Renaissance and Golden Age in focus, this book opens up new and often surprising perspectives on a region all the more intriguing for the very complexity of its entanglements.







The Rhine: National Tensions, Romantic Visions


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Of all European landscapes and regions, the Rhine is one of the most heavily overlaid with cultural and political meaning. Cradle of Romanticism, tourism, and the picturesque, bone of contention between the German and French spheres of cultural and geopolitical influence, the Rhine has attracted armies, artists, activists and tourists for centuries and has featured prominently the key writings of Europe’s literary and intellectual history from Byron to Lucien Febvre. This volume brings together eminent literary and cultural historians to present materials and analyses from various of the central nexus of European culture. The volume also contains a unique and comprehensive anthology of key texts (historical, poetical and polemical) related to the Rhineland and its contested position. Contributors are: Reinhard Baumann, Manfred Beller, Hans-Werner Breunig, Giovanna Cermelli, Joep Leerssen, Elmar Scheuren, Helmut J. Schneider, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz.




Literature of the Low Countries


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The Guns at Last Light


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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The magnificent conclusion to Rick Atkinson's acclaimed Liberation Trilogy about the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II It is the twentieth century's unrivaled epic: at a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first two volumes of his bestselling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted how the American-led coalition fought through North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Now, in The Guns at Last Light, he tells the most dramatic story of all—the titanic battle for Western Europe. D-Day marked the commencement of the final campaign of the European war, and Atkinson's riveting account of that bold gamble sets the pace for the masterly narrative that follows. The brutal fight in Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the disaster that was Operation Market Garden, the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and finally the thrust to the heart of the Third Reich—all these historic events and more come alive with a wealth of new material and a mesmerizing cast of characters. Atkinson tells the tale from the perspective of participants at every level, from presidents and generals to war-weary lieutenants and terrified teenage riflemen. When Germany at last surrenders, we understand anew both the devastating cost of this global conflagration and the enormous effort required to win the Allied victory. With the stirring final volume of this monumental trilogy, Atkinson's accomplishment is manifest. He has produced the definitive chronicle of the war that unshackled a continent and preserved freedom in the West. One of The Washington Post's Top 10 Books of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013




Etude


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Includes music.




Legends of the Rhine


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Excerpt from Legends of the Rhine: And of the Low Countries The following stories were gathered from various sources, and Some of them freely adapted from the literature of the countries where the scenes are laid. Brabant and Flanders, so fertile in subjects of romantic history, and of which the author has availed himself in previous productions, have furnished materials for some of those included in the present publication. The "Bijdragen tot het oude Strafregt in Belgie," and the "Chroniques et Traditions Surnaturelles de la Flandre," works not readily accessible in England, have been freely borrowed from; and in selecting from the German Legendary Tales the authors chief object was to pass over such as turned on magic and enchantment, and to choose those which embodied motives or passions merely mortal. He has admitted but one exception to this rule; and that only because human feeling was there predominant over fairy spells. One of the Rhine Stories had been already made the subject of a poem, the author's earliest literary attempt, and which he soon suppressed. For one or two others contained in the present volume, it might not be easy to give any other authority. But it is hoped they will be read with that confiding good faith which prefers taking things for granted to sifting evidence or comparing proofs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.




Willis's Price Current


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