Introduction: Fernand Braudel and the Invention of a Modernist’s Mediterranean

Abstract

The Introduction breaks new ground in Mediterranean Studies by re-examining the life and thought of a major figure in the discipline, Fernand Braudel. Braudel’s writing was shaped by his wartime experience, which was marked by technological advancements, huge movements of population, the spread of varied political ideologies, the breakdown of colonial and imperial power, and new innovations in the aesthetic expression of the human experience. Braudel is thus conceived as a modernist, and his Mediterranean was thus created within modernist political, aesthetic, and ideological contexts. This leads to a summary of the essays which comprise the volume, demonstrating the ways each address the fundamental tension of art influenced by competing visions of past and future, tradition and innovation, foreign and local.