Description: This evocative and wide-ranging set of articles is a forceful demonstration of how much the experience of East-Central and Eastern Europe, largely neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on to meet it. Themes that are universal (exile, loss, trauma, survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern European history of the impact of the age of the world wars.
Review Quotes: "The Art of Identity and Memory provides rich and rare material on how Europe's twentieth century was shaped by war. If the political and military history of Europe's eastern frontiers have been extensively chronicled and analyzed, it is only in recent years that local scholars with access to archives and equipped with the requisite linguistic and critical skills have begun to unlock the cultural history of those regions that witnessed the most intense devastation. The publication of this book testifies to the emergence of a new generation of world-class scholars from the region, who are busily filling in the blank spaces of national historiographies with genuinely transnational approaches to the past."--Violeta Davoliute, Joseph P. Kazickas Associate Research Scholar, Yale University, Senior Researcher, Faculty of History, Vilnius University