Bringing her original insights into theory and philosophy to bear upon the controversial question of revision in Irish history, Evi Gkotzaridis presents the first historical and theoretical examination of the trailblazer historians who, from 1938, spearheaded an unpoliticized Irish history. Drawing on hitherto unused archives, Trials of Irish History shows how the venture to disenthrall Irish and European history from official propagandas proved stimulating and challenging, but perilous. Providing a new and stimulating conceptual framework for the study of Irish historiography, the book combines a theoretical approach with close analysis of important case studies and includes: * an incisive restaging of the passionate joust that took place between revisionists and traditionalists in the shadow of the Troubles * examination of the cultural contradiction of the first decades of independence, the estrangement of two regimes and the devastation of the Second World War * comparison of the Irish Kulturkampf to similar discussions in German and France in order to identify and examine the arguments propounded on each side. Prising open conflicting intellectual notions about the function of history in a divided society, this will be an informative and stimulating addition to the study of Irish history.

In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.

Every nation develops a narrative structure for thinking about history that is generated by its own historical experience. In this study, the German and Austrian-German “historias”—the way narratives of factual significance are structured as the “story” of events—are shown in their sameness from the late 1600s to the present. This “historia” shapes the emphasis of how meaning is articulated among the historians of a society. The author argues that German and Austrian-German societies would benefit from understanding the constrictions and oversights generated by the narrative style of their traditional historias.

The Bildungsroman, or "novel of formation," has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. In Formative Fictions, Tobias Boes argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what Boes calls "cosmopolitan remainders," identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation. In Formative Fictions, Boes presents readings of a number of novels-Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus among them-that have always been felt to be particularly "German" and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.