Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney LITERATURE AND THE PRODUCTION OF CULTURAL MEMORY: INTRODUCTION Over the last decade, ‘cultural memory’ has emerged as a useful umbrella term to describe the complex ways in which societies remember their past using a variety of media. Where earlier discussions of collective memory had a thematic focus and were concerned above all with identifying the ‘sites of memory’ that act as placeholders for the memories of particular groups, attention has been shifting in recent years to the cultural processes by which memories become shared in the first place. It has become increasingly apparent that the memories that are shared within generations and across different generations are the product of public acts of remembrance using a variety of media. Stories, both oral and written, images, museums, monuments: these all work together in creating and sustaining ‘sites of memory’. Thus everyone reading this issue of EJES will have some ‘recollection’ of the First World War, but since most readers were not alive in 1914, these ‘recollections’ are vicarious ones, the product of accumulated exposure to a common reservoir of products, including photographs and documentaries, museums, personal accounts, histories and novels. Keywords cultural memory studies; media of cultural memory; literature and cultural memory; literature’s roles in the production of cultural memory; mimesis of cultural memory With this issue devoted to ‘Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory’ we aim to throw light on the specific role of literature as a medium of cultural memory. While acknowledging that cultural memory involves the ongoing cooperation between different media and that this cooperation is particularly intense in the contemporary world, it nevertheless seems worthwhile to focus here on one medium in particular as a way of bringing the ‘mediatised’ aspect of cultural remembrance more sharply into focus. By opting for literature, moreover, we were motivated by the realisation that it would allow us to consider more long-term processes (after all, texts have been around for many generations) as well as by the hope that it would allow us to build a bridge between the field of English studies and the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies where different national traditions of scholarship (Anglo- American, French, German, and so forth) are converging in the production of new theories. EJES seems to us to be an ideal forum for fostering an informed exchange between these fields and stimulating a scholarly dialogue that crosses the borders of European countries. European Journal of English Studies Vol. 10, No. 2 August 2006, pp. 111 – 115 ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4243 online ª 2006 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13825570600753394