Product Description

In recent years, memory has become a central, though also a controversial, concept in historical studies a term that denotes both a new and distinctive field of study and a fresh way of conceptualizing history as a field of inquiry more generally. Thinking about memory, as both an individual and a collective or social phenomenon, has drawn historians into debates about the nature of their own discipline, and into fruitful but sometimes problematic exchanges with practitioners of other disciplines (sociology, psychology, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, etc.) This book, which is aimed both at specialists and at students, provides historians with an accessible and stimulating introduction to debates and theories about memory, and to the range of approaches that have been taken to the study of it in history and other disciplines. In doing this, it makes connections between what are often disparate areas of scholarship dealing, for example, with individual memory, with groups as mnemonic units, with practices of commemoration, and with the wide variety of ways in which relationships to the past are socially organized, politically contested and culturally articulated. The book contributes in a wide-ranging way to debate on some of the central conceptual problems of memory studies: the relationships between the individual and the collective, between memory as survival and memory as reconstruction, between remembering as a subjective experience and as a social or cultural practice, and between memory and history as modes of retrospective knowledge.

Introduction; 1. History and memory: an imagined relationship; 2. History and the individual; 3. Remembering in society; 4. Memory and transmission; 5. Social memory and the collective past; Index.

Geoffrey Cubitt is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York