Making cultural history : new perspectives on Western heritage

»Vad är det som är allra roligast att läsa? Det är vill jag påstå texter som man inte visste att de fanns, om ämnen som man aldrig tänkt på som ämnen. Just den sortens texter möter man i antologin Making cultural history ett fynd för den som vill förstå vad som format den tid vi lever i Det som kanske imponerar allra mest med boken är hur uppenbart engagerade, ja, inte sällan passionerade skribenterna är.« Merete Mazzarella, Svenska Dagbladet

Cultural history tends to elude positive definition. It deals in some sense with culture, and with history, combined in a creative and often critical analysis. But its strength and analytical potential is to be found in its slipperiness, in its critical attitude to authoritative categorization, and its relentless movement towards new angles, new spaces beyond the evident and the canonical.

This volume has sprung out of the Research School for Studies in Cultural History at the Faculty of Humanities of Stockholm University, a five-year interdisciplinary research programme focusing on interplays between past and present. The Research School has provided a productive space for border-crossing academic enterprises. And as a result, the seventeen essays of this volume display just as many innovative approaches to traditional academic subjects such as celebrity, literary genre, prehistoric remains, television, and historic monuments. All stem from unexpected combinations and sliding perspectives, focusing on obscure corners and gaps between the illuminated centres of traditional academic knowledge. From such sliding perspectives follows the realization that all narratives, representations, and claims of culture and history are in some sense political.

The seventeen essays in this volume demonstrate how a shifting kaleidoscope of the academic subjects makes new knowledge possible, and enables the formulation of new critical questions. Challenging, disturbing, inspirational, these essays all make cultural history.

This is a Print on Demand-edition of a previously published book.