Books in the Routledge Approaches to History series

This innovative and original collection of essays brings together writings by an international team of historians to examine the ethical and methodological issues that arise in the conduct and "good practice" of oral history and memory studies research in the specific context of the former Soviet-dominated socialist bloc in Eastern Europe.

Beyond Memory analyses the intricate connections between silence, acts of remembrance and acts of forgetting, and relates the topic of silence to the international research field of Cultural Memory Studies. It engages with the most recent work in the field by viewing silence as a remedy to the traditionally binary approach to our understanding of remembering and forgetting. With an introduction by the editors discussing Memory Studies, and concluding remarks by Astrid Erll, this collection demonstrates that acceptance and consideration of silence as having both a performative and aesthetic dimension is an essential component of history and memory studies.

Defining a ¿historic transition¿ means understanding how the complex system of intellectual, social, and material structures formed that determined the transition from a certain ¿universe¿ to a ¿new universe,¿ where the old explanations were radically rethought. In this book, a group of historians with specializations ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and across political, religious, and social fields, attempt a reinterpretation of ¿modernity¿ as the new ¿Axial Age.¿