Imagining the Balkans
" 'If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented,' was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication Europe, Imagining the Balkans attempts to trace the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belies lettres in many languages, this work explores the ontology of the Balkans from the eighteenth century up to the present, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is being transmitted as a discourse. The author, raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject. A region geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as "the other," the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the "European" has been constructed, Todorova offers a timely, accessible study of how an innocent geographical appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history" -- Page 4 of cover
Print Book, English, 1997
Oxford University Press, New York, 1997