Biography

Guylian Nemegeer is a Junior Postdoctoral Fellow in Literary Studies at Ghent University, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). He earned his PhD from Ghent University in 2022 with a dissertation on the ideological role of the Renaissance in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s cultural nationalism. His current research examines how the Renaissance has been metaphorized in French and Italian literature and culture from the late nineteenth century onward. His first monograph, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Italy’s Renaissance, is forthcoming, and he recently co-edited the special issue “Latinity and Modernity: Transnational Perspectives” for Romance Quarterly. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Incontri: rivista europea di studi italiani.

Project Summary

This project investigates how French and Italian modernists between 1870 and 1915 mobilized the myth of a Latin Renaissance to confront perceptions of national decline during the first wave of globalization. Focusing on the intellectual output of figures such as Angelo De Gubernatis, Giosuè Carducci, Charles Sauvebois, and Charles Maurras, it examines how the Renaissance—reimagined as both a historical era and a metaphor for cultural and political rebirth—offered a powerful framework for addressing questions of literary identity, imperial ambition, and the realities of modern warfare. Drawing on literary histories, periodicals, and unpublished correspondence, the study reveals a key ideological current in pre-World War I Europe: the belief in the Latin Renaissance as a source of rejuvenation in response to modern crises. It argues that modernist writers used this myth both to criticize their cultural marginalization and to imagine new forms of political and cultural agency. Ultimately, the project sheds light on the Renaissance’s enduring impact on modernism and its continued relevance to contemporary debates about the role of the humanities in a globalized world.