The Introduction situates the book within the theoretical parameters of Cultural Memory Studies, Print Culture Studies and British Studies. It provides a short history of Memory Studies, focusing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as well as Aleida Assmann’s, Astrid Erll’s and Ann Rigney’s focus on media and memory. It surveys the complex media ecology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the role that printed texts played in articulating sites of memory changed between 1688 and 1745 as the meaning of print itself changed in relation to oral and manuscript cultures. It compares the media environments of the beginning and end of this period by focusing on the creation and circulation of two documents – the Declaration of William of Orange (1688) and the Particulars of the Victory regarding the Battle of Culloden (1746). The Introduction concludes by suggesting that Michael Rothberg’s concept of noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory) provides a useful model for examining printed works of British national memory in the mid-eighteenth century.

This chapter traces the emergence of the field of memory studies and assesses the historians’ contribution to this field. In particular the influential work of Pierre Nora is discussed here. Memory history, it argues, has moved from underpinning national historical master narratives to promoting transnational cosmopolitan forms of memory that in turn have produced greater self-reflexivity about the relationship between historical writing and collective identity formation and helped to de-essentialise collective identities. The chapter introduces and analyses a range of different memory debates that all, in their different ways, have helped to de-essentialise the construction of collective identities: memory debates surrounding communism, the Holocaust, Brexit, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa are all discussed in this respect. The chapter also introduces the concept of ‘agonistic memory’ and discusses how it may help to repoliticise memory and contribute to greater self-reflexivity about the construction of memory and the shaping of collective identities.

The chapter seeks to problematize what it means to ‘map’ literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the example of Romantic poet John Clare. The first half of the chapter rereads Clare through one critical and two creative interpretations of his sense of place and space, by John Barrell, Franco Moretti, and Iain Sinclair. Reading Clare in, and through, others generates a multilayered response that highlights the range of spatial forms of interpretation embraced by literary studies whilst also critically interpreting both maps and texts used in those arguments. The second half of the chapter offers a fresh reading-as-mapping of Clare by prioritizing time over space, drawing upon a concept articulated by French historian Pierre Nora, that of lieux de mémoire (sites/realms of memory). Nora’s model of the loss of shared, lived history and its memorialization in fixed sites is applied to Clare to enable a move from a focus on the predominantly spatial to the spatio-temporal. Does the concept of lieux de mémoire only work at a macro level, or can be localized in an individual? This section seeks to come at place through the memory that it embodies.