This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists' biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists' Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists' biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists' Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.

In his groundbreaking Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, Benedict Anderson argued that members of a community experience a "deep, horizontal camaraderie." Despite being strangers, members feel connected in a web of imagined experiences. Yet while Anderson's insights have been hugely influential, they remain abstract: it is difficult to imagine imagined communities. How do they evolve and how is membership constructed cognitively, socially and culturally? How do individuals and communities contribute to group formation through the act of imagining? And what is the glue that holds communities together? Imagining Communities examines actual processes of experiencing the imagined community, exploring its emotive force in a number of case studies. Communal bonding is analysed, offering concrete insights on where and by whom the nation (or social group) is imagined and the role of individuals therein. Offering eleven empirical case studies, ranging from the premodern to the modern age, this volume looks at and beyond the nation and includes regional as well as transnational communities as well.

Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been widely postulated for several decades now. This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. It gathers together essays that engage with objects of study ranging from poetry, prose, and political ideas to painting, porcelain, and popular song, and which draw on examples in Icelandic, Arabic, German, Irish, Hungarian, and French, among other languages. The contributors study transcultural phenomena from the medieval and early modern periods through to the modern and postmodern era, frequently challenging conventional periodizations and analytical frameworks based on the idea of the nation-state.

This book focuses on the 20th century lives of men and women whose life-work and life experiences transgressed and surpassed the national boundaries that existed or emerged in the 20th century. The chapters explore how these life-stories add innovative transnational perspectives to the entangled histories of the world wars, decolonization, the Cold War and post-colonialism. The subjects vary from artists, intellectuals, and politicians to ordinary citizens, each with their own unique set of experiences, interactions and interpretations. They trace the building of socio-cultural and professional networks, the casual encounters of everyday life, and the travel, translation, and preserving of life stories in different media. In these multiple ways the book makes a strong case for reclaiming lost personal narratives that have been passed over by more orthodox nation-state focused approaches. These explorations make use of social and historical categories such as class, gender, religion and race in a transnational context, arguing that the transnational characteristics of these categories overflow the nation-state frame. In this way they can be used to 'unhinge' the primarily national context of history-writing. By drawing on personal records and other primary sources, the chapters in this book release many layers of subjectivity otherwise lost, enabling a richer understanding of how individuals move through, interact with and are affected by the major events of their time. "Taking up what the editors refer to as the 'casual border crossings of everyday life,' this collection considers how lives are made in, through, beyond, and in spite of, nation-state configurations. The essays demonstrate that transnational encounters - human, material, conceptual, and translational - enable unique and sometimes unexpected contact zones, and further, show how a transnational lens can complicate and unsettle understandings of class, race, gender, and ethnicity, but also, and importantly, life writing and transnationalism themselves." - Prof. dr. Sonja Boon, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada "This volume is a call to question national contexts as self-evident starting points for life writing. Rather than presenting a limiting method or perspective on the transnational lives of the central figures (and objects) in each chapter, the authors show that unhinging the national framework implies grappling with discursive powers such as archival arrangements, international networks as legacies of past imperial spaces, and inequalities in terms of gender, race, class, and language. Unhinging the national framework also helps demonstrate how national frameworks push and pull, while transnational allegiances add up, overlap, and conflict. The evocative episodes of the lives (and in some cases the deaths) of the volume's historical actors help us, as readers, to reflect on the continued dominance of national frameworks in our current globalized world, and what they mean in our own lives." - Prof. dr. Susan Legene, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

This book focuses on the 20th century lives of men and women whose life-work and life experiences transgressed and surpassed the national boundaries that existed or emerged in the 20th century. The chapters explore how these life-stories add innovative transnational perspectives to the entangled histories of the world wars, decolonization, the Cold War and post-colonialism. The subjects vary from artists, intellectuals, and politicians to ordinary citizens, each with their own unique set of experiences, interactions and interpretations. They trace the building of socio-cultural and professional networks, the casual encounters of everyday life, and the travel, translation, and preserving of life stories in different media. In these multiple ways the book makes a strong case for reclaiming lost personal narratives that have been passed over by more orthodox nation-state focused approaches. These explorations make use of social and historical categories such as class, gender, religion and race in a transnational context, arguing that the transnational characteristics of these categories overflow the nation-state frame. In this way they can be used to 'unhinge' the primarily national context of history-writing. By drawing on personal records and other primary sources, the chapters in this book release many layers of subjectivity otherwise lost, enabling a richer understanding of how individuals move through, interact with and are affected by the major events of their time. "Taking up what the editors refer to as the 'casual border crossings of everyday life,' this collection considers how lives are made in, through, beyond, and in spite of, nation-state configurations. The essays demonstrate that transnational encounters - human, material, conceptual, and translational - enable unique and sometimes unexpected contact zones, and further, show how a transnational lens can complicate and unsettle understandings of class, race, gender, and ethnicity, but also, and importantly, life writing and transnationalism themselves." - Prof. dr. Sonja Boon, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada "This volume is a call to question national contexts as self-evident starting points for life writing. Rather than presenting a limiting method or perspective on the transnational lives of the central figures (and objects) in each chapter, the authors show that unhinging the national framework implies grappling with discursive powers such as archival arrangements, international networks as legacies of past imperial spaces, and inequalities in terms of gender, race, class, and language. Unhinging the national framework also helps demonstrate how national frameworks push and pull, while transnational allegiances add up, overlap, and conflict. The evocative episodes of the lives (and in some cases the deaths) of the volume's historical actors help us, as readers, to reflect on the continued dominance of national frameworks in our current globalized world, and what they mean in our own lives." - Prof. dr. Susan Legene, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands