Azja nie istnieje
Asia: Non Existent

Summary/Abstract: Although the number of monographs devoted to the history of the notion of Asia – a typical and meaningful constituent of commonplace imaginative geography – is scarce, anyone willing to take a closer look at how it was getting shaped can just refer to one of the numerous works on the history of the idea of Europe. The word ‘Asia’ accompanied ‘Europe’ ever since the two came to existence in literature produced in what is today the area of Europe. starting from the description of the Greek-Persian war in Herodot, through the relevant texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hegel, Hugo, Marx, and others, down to our contemporary texts, one can trace metonymisation and personification of those, originally purely geographical, terms in subsequent authors who conscientiously inherited the rhetoric from their predecessors. Even a superficial review of this process enables one to state that the notion of ‘Asia’ served as a negative antonym with which such authors attempted at defining and subliming the image of Europe, conditional upon the needs of the time and the ideology of self-determination as valid with the Europeans of a given epoch.

• Details
• Contents