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.