In recent years, 'memory' has become a central, though also a controversial, concept in historical studies - a term that denotes both a new and distinctive field of study and a fresh way of conceptualizing history as a field of inquiry more generally.

This book, which is aimed both at specialists and at students, provides historians with an accessible and stimulating introduction to debates and theories about memory, and to the range of approaches that have been taken to the study of it in history and other disciplines

Contributing in a wide-ranging way to debate on some of the central conceptual problems of memory studies, the book explores the relationships between the individual and the collective, between memory as survival and memory as reconstruction, between remembering as a subjective experience and as a social or cultural practice, and between memory and history as modes of retrospective knowledge.