New Publication by Balazs Trencsenyi: "Regimes of Historicity" in Southeastern and Northern Europe. Discourses of Identity and Temporality, 1890-1945

The volume undertakes a comparative analysis of the various discursive traditions dealing with the connection between modernity and historicity in two 'small-culture' European regions: Southeastern and Northern Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark). It seeks to reconstruct the ways in which different 'temporalities' and time horizons produced alternative representations of the past and the future, of continuity and discontinuity in a wide spectrum of twentieth-century social and political thinking about modernity and identity: how the ever-growing distance between experience and expectation shaped identity discourse and political action; how the 'politics of time' framed political languages in these regions. Above all, the book focuses on the ways in which these political traditions and languages of identity were shaped and interpreted by the different branches of the humanities and the newly formed social sciences. The volume calls for a rethink of the usual metaphors rooted in temporal dimensions that are used for non-core Western cultures, such as belatedness, asynchrony, backwardness, catching-up, and rebirth.