The cultural history of Europe: a transnational point of view

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show that cultural history, thought of as a social and transnational history of symbolic goods, can make a decisive contribution to resolving some of the aporias that beset the historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Is this, then, the time of the apogee of the nation, or, on the contrary, the time of the first globalisation? Should the narrative focus on the construction of national identities, the erection of borders and cataclysmic international conflict, or on the intensification of the movement of goods and people, the constitution of an international civil and political society and the growing convergence of Euro-Atlantic economies and societies? A useful way of overcoming these aporias is to show, through the study of the circulation of symbolic goods, and by taking the example of literary translation, how these two traditionally opposed histories are in fact closely linked to each other, in order to propose a transnational history of the inter-nationalisation of contemporary Europe.