Reimagining the Balkans

Negotiating Modernity and Nationhood in British Travel Writing about Southeastern Europe, 1875-1914
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-96859-9
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Ideas beyond Borders

This book investigates how southeastern Europe entered the British public imagination through travel literature between the Great Eastern Crisis (1875-78) and the First World War. Pivoting away from postcolonial readings of travel writing that suggest the Balkans was invariably viewed as an ‘inferior’ version of Western Europe, it fills a historiographical gap by positioning the peninsula as a contact zone of British travellers where transnational questions about changing social norms and political polarisation played out.

Reconsidering the extensive corpus of published travel writing about the Balkans and combining this with archival research on prominent travellers, including Aubrey Herbert and Edith Durham, this book argues that representations of the largely agrarian societies of the Balkans functioned as transnational conduits through which writers discussed anxieties surrounding Britain’s perceived decline, including first-wave feminism, national efficiency, industrial militancy and so-called alien immigration. It demonstrates the importance of the recurring agrarian archetypes of southeastern Europe to national debates about what it meant to be ‘British’ in an era of contested political, cultural, and social identities and provides a defence of travelogues as historical source material.

Reimagining the Balkans is aimed at scholars in History and Literary Studies and postgraduate students of British, European or Intellectual History.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cameron, Ross

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Reflections of Travel Writing, Imagined Pasts and Southeast European Imagology

Chapter 1

‘Peoples whose fate matters as much to us as those of Mongol Tartary’: Travel Writing about the Balkans in the 1880s and 1890s

Chapter 2

‘The Last Cock Pit of Europe’: The Crisis of British Masculinity in Macedonian Travelogues after the 1903 Ilinden Uprising

Chapter 3

‘The coasts, the islands, the channels of Dalmatia are as yet uninvaded’: The Eastern Adriatic in British Tourist Literature before 1914

Chapter 4

‘The Lessons of the Balkan War’: Debating Atrocities and National Efficiency in War Correspondence from the Balkan Wars, 1912-13

Chapter 5

‘The Albanian is intensely Albanian’: Mary Edith Durham, Aubrey Herbert and Albanian Independence

Chapter 6

‘It bears a strong resemblance to a Russian provincial town’: Locating the Limits of the Balkans in Travel Writing about Romania, 1875-1914

Conclusion

Towards a New Imagological Historiography

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Ross Cameron is a Fellow at University of the Arts London on the AHRC-funded Victorian Hand project. He completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2024 on British depictions of southeastern Europe and has published in Studies in Travel Writing, European History Quarterly, among other venues.