We congratulate Dagmar Lorenz on the “Outstanding Academic Title” citation with which her book Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature has been honoured. This book is vol. 24 in the Studia Imagologica series.
The citations are awarded annually by Choice (the review periodical of the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Organization) to a select number of the 6000 publications it reviews each year.

We are delighted to announce that the handbook edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters : a Critical Survey (Amsterdam/Leiden: Rodopi/Brill, 2007), has been made available for Open Access consultation on this website by kind permission from Brill Publishers in Leiden. The contents are posted here under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND, meaning that users can make free use of the posted articles, provided they give appropriate credit (source reference), refrain from using the material for commercial purposes, and do not distribute the material in modified or altered form.
For users’ convenience, the handbook’s many cross-references have been turned into clickable hyperlinks. The bibliographies are given as they were in the 2007 book; more recent material may be found in the website’s Bibliography section.
We invite you to check out the handbook contents under the Ethnotypology tab!

The Volkskrant reports (21 August 2019) that The Natherlands have the right to name a new exoplanet. The public have been asked to submit suggestions to a committee (oops, sorry, a “National Committee”, of course). Its president, Marieke Baan, is putting her hopes on a “nice, Dutch theme” for the name (een lekker Hollands thema), such as one of the Wadden islands or a painter (Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Bosch, Vermeer, etc). Banal nationalism takes to the stars — to infinity and beyond.

As The Indepedent and other news media reported on 17 August 2019, the UK’s Arts Minister Rebecca Pow has placed an export ban on the painting Ferdinand Lured By Ariel (1850) by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. The painting depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) recommended an export ban because of the detail of the natural life observed in the garden setting, and, more importantly, because the theme, the garden setting, and the artist were considered to be quintessentially English in character.
Pow called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood “a key part of British history and this is why we must keep this important work in the country.” RCEWA member Peter Barder called the painting “a summation of everything English. A novel interpretation of an episode from Shakespeare, it is set in a minutely observed English garden in the summer. [...] Such close observation was unique to the Pre-Raphaelites, one of the very few distinctively British art movements. An epitome of its type and of Englishness, I hope a British institution will find the means to keep it in this country”.
The comments pinpoint the conscious invocation of tradition (and that meant, almost by default, English tradition) by the Pre-Raphaelites; they also show how that programme of “Englishness” has meanwhile become a key factor in the assignment of value to their work; what is more, an Englishness that reponds to the Pre-Raphaelite nostalgic taste for Shakespeare, country gardens, and Victorian eye-candy aesthetics.

As an imagologist I am often asked by my social-scientific or social-historical colleagues how I can determine the representativity of the literary material I study. If, in studying the English image of Italy, I draw on George Eliot and E.M. Foster, is that not a very restricted and rarefied data sample, almost a random stab in the dark? What wider conclusions could possibly be drawn from such a minute sample regarding ‘the’ image of Italy in England, or attitudes generally vis-à-vis Italy as current in England?

That ‘representativity’ challenge is irrelevant and pernicious, and should be rejected out of hand. It imposes on the humanities an entire set of assumptions and working methods that are alien and uncongenial to it, beginning with the idea  (too ingrained to be consciously reflected upon, let alone queried) that what we study are selected samples as proxy data for a larger whole – that larger whole being, ideally, society as such.
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Two items in the British quality Press (Guardian and Observer) about Irish culture, from January 2018 and April 2019.

In one, German-born, Irish-raised Stephanie Preissner, co-writer of the Netflix comedy show Can’t Cope Won’t Cope, combines pop history and feminist denunciations of ingrained misogyny into Irish essentialist self-stereotyping: “It’s said that Irish people are funnier because they’ve developed humour as a coping mechanism for the terrible stuff that’s happened in our past [...] If that’s true, humour is bound to be ingrained in the DNA of Irish women given the horrors we’ve dealt with.”
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On 26-28 June 2019, an imagological conference will be hosted at the Center of Human Sciences of the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn (Poland). The conference title is Image as a topic of communicative theory, cultural anrhropology and text semiotics. We will post the URL of the conference website as soon as it is onlne. A PDF can be downloaded here.

The imagology site will maintain a blog of contemporary manifestations of national essentialism – the spread of ethnotypes and the belief in ethnicity/“culture” as a social explanation. Many of these are diffuse, ephemeral, “banal”. Hence the need to capture and document them.

The electronic journal Iberic@l: Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines, published for the Institut d’Études hispaniques at the Sorbonne, has published a theme issue (nr 10, Autumn 2016) edited by Géraldine Galeote: La construction des identités nationales depuis une perspective transnationale. Iberic@l is online at http://iberical.paris-sorbonne.fr.

A Conference on National stereotyping and cultural identities in recent European crises will be held at the “Long Room Hub”, Trinity College Dublin, on 09-11 March 2017. It will investigate how recent European crises such as the Euro crisis, the Ukraine conflict, the threat of terrorism, increased migration, the rise of right wing, populist neo-nationalism across Europe and most recently the looming Brexit have revived and used centuries-old, culturally constructed patterns of national stereotyping and how these have been actualized and instrumentalized in public discourse and political debate.

A fuller descripton and programme is online here.