PROFILES OF ALBANIANHOOD IN THE FOCUS OF BRITISH ROMANTIC LENSES
PROFILES OF ALBANIANHOOD IN THE FOCUS OF BRITISH ROMANTIC LENSES

Summary/Abstract: Due to various political, social and economic reasons, unfortunately, Albanian culture, literature and history at large, have long been traced and written by foreigners rather than Albanians. Although often labeled as a "mute" people who cannot express themselves because of the disappearance of historical sources, for the sake of truth, there has always been a considerable collective memory among Albanian people which has quite frequently been used by prominent writers and albanologists. The prototype of the romantic poet, Lord Byron, and British albanologist, Edith Durham, are probably the two main credentials in their efforts to serve as spokespersons of the Albanian life in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century in the eyes of the civilized world. The purpose of this paper is to present profiles of Albanianhood as recorded in the British romantic diary of Durham’s “The burden of the Balkans” held during her first lengthy expedition, on horseback and on foot, through the wilds of southern and central Albania and the long poem by Lord Byron “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage”- Canto II. What brings these two names together despite the century-long span of their literary creativity seems to be the fact that their life ideology was led by the cult of individual freedom and at the same time by the romantic conviction that it is not acceptable, not even in the nature of things that the world remain immobile.

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