There is an increasingly widespread sense that Europe is in crisis. Notions of a shared European identity and a common European culture appear to be losing their purchase. This crisis is often seen as a conflict between a cosmopolitan and a nationalist idea of Europe. The reality is, however, considerably more complex, as the long history of the idea of Europe reveals. In The Idea of Europe: A Critical History, Shane Weller explores that history from its origins in classical antiquity to the present day. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he demonstrates that, all too often, seemingly progressive ideas of Europe have been shaped by Eurocentric, culturally supremacist, and even racist assumptions. Seeking to break with this troubling pattern, Weller calls for an idea of Europe shaped by a spirit of self-critique and by an openness to those cultures that have for so long been dismissed as non-European.

This book charts the history of a distinct strain of European literary modernism that emerged out of a radical re-engagement with late nineteenth-century language scepticism. Focusing first on the literary and philosophical strands of this language-sceptical tradition, the book proceeds to trace the various forms of linguistic negativism deployed by European writers in the interwar and post-war years, including Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. Through close analyses of these and other writers' attempts to capture an 'unspeakable' experience, Language and Negativity in European Modernism explores the remarkable literary attempt to deploy the negative potentialities of language in order to articulate an experience of what, shortly after the Second World War, Beckett described as a vision of 'humanity in ruins'.

Focusing on a wide range of philosophers and writers, from Nietzsche to Derrida and Flaubert to Borges, this book charts the history of the deployment of the concept of nihilism within the discourses of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and considers the similarities and differences between modernist and postmodernist approaches to nihilism.