The nation’s “timeless mission”
The nation’s “timeless mission”

Frontier Orientalism in Central European historical fiction

Summary/Abstract: Andre Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism focuses on the former Habsburg Empire,which has been overlooked by Orientalist and postcolonial studies. Through a comparisonof Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech novelists, including Janko Kalinčiak, Henryk Sienkiewicz,Géza Gárdonyi, Jaroslav Durych, and Jozef Horák, this study shows how the genre ofhistorical fiction evoked what Gingrich calls Central Europe’s “timeless mission” of defendingthe frontiers of the West from Eastern barbarians, as a metaphor for the repression ofminority identities.

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