Balcanii în literatura de călătorie britanică a secolului al XIX-lea
The Balkans in nineteenth-century British travel writing

Summary/Abstract: The present study is a survey of British travel literature about the Balkans in the 19th century, the development of stereotypes and their impact upon present day representations. In the introduction to her History of the Balkans Barbara Jalevics asserted that the Balkan Peninsula “usually impinged on Western consciousness only when it has become the scene of wars”. Throughout much of the past two hundred years, long periods of indifference towards the peninsula, which has tended to be comparatively marginal to British interests, were interspersed by moments of scrambling for highly-quotable facts at the onset of a conflict. That years of near-complete silence are followed by large clusters of works in the time of crises in many ways confirms the fact that the Balkans have tended to be viewed as relatively marginal. Simultaneously familiar and, literally, unhomelike (Unheimlich), the Balkans remain an internal Other – a stranger within – against which Western European writers project and exorcize Europe’s own identity-related taboos.

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