Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1990–2000vania, 1989 has opened the space for the hitherto suppressed researchon topics related to Hungarian history in Romania. The last decade hasbeen thus marked by attempts to upgrade the scope of the research onTransylvania. In addition, compared to the general historical literaturein Hungary, these works had an extremely significant impact on the publicopinion and the process of identity building.The potential convergence between the research agendas of theRomanian and Hungarian historians has thus provided a major stimulusfor a unified treatment of the two bibliographies. The main aim of thepresent bibliography is not to present the Romanian and Hungarian historiographiesas conflicting sides on the international scholarly scene.By putting them side-by-side, the authors hope to facilitate an interactiveand comparative study of the two historiographic traditions, and to highlighttheir points of contact and convergence, as well as their divergences.In fact, having in mind the traditional Romanian-Hungarian historiographiccontroversies, one might ask: what is the intellectual value ofthese debates and where they might eventually lead, if even publicationsfocusing on common problems cannot be arranged according to the sameanalytical categories?Given the above-mentioned complexity and variety of the themescovered (further amplified by the different analytical frameworks developedin the two countries), the authors have opted for an organization infour chronological sections ranging from the early modern period to 1989,supplemented by three introductory sections focusing on the relationshipbetween national and regional history, the Romanian-Hungarian historiographicalconvergences and the general history of Transylvania. Eachbibliographical section is divided into Romanian and Hungarian sub-sections,based on the language of publication. In addition, a third sub-sectionis added, comprising works by Romanian and Hungarian authors inforeign languages, in an effort to explore the output of the “national” historiographieson the international market.The first sections of the bibliography focus on the divergent thematicdirections of the respective national canons. The first one, on symbolicgeography, explores an important intellectual venture in the region characterizingthe 1980-1990s: the attempt of mapping the respective culturesin view of the European political and cultural space. Romanian historiographyhad to face the challenge of reconciling the ambiguous dialectic oftwo paradigms that seemed at times contradictory: Central-Europe andSoutheast Europe (i.e. the “Balkans”). At the same time, in Hungary, onecan speak of a gradual abandonment of the polemic discourse of CentralEurope, so prominent in the 1980s, in favor of an attempt to localize theHungarian historical space in a – not so ideological – regional context and,311