Project Title: Reimagining the Balkans: Negotiating Modernity and Nationhood in British Travel Writing about Southeastern Europe, 1875-1914
What was your research about?
This thesis scrutinises representations of the Balkans in British travel writing between the Eastern Crisis (1875-78) and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It argues that the imagined geography of southeastern Europe in travel writing evolved in dialogue with domestic issues prevalent in Britain’s public sphere and fills a lacuna in previous historiography that has been too focused on outlining the lineaments of discourse. Moving beyond the straitjacket of postcolonial readings of travel writing that suggest an always already present hierarchy between the cultural standards of observer and observed, this thesis positions the Balkans as a contact zone for British travellers where contemporary questions about changing social norms and political polarisation played out. Representations of the Balkans in travel writing evolved in a transnational context in which writers interpreted the region’s largely agrarian societies through the prism of modern social and cultural change. Political developments internal to the Balkans, such as the Ilinden Uprising (1903), the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and antisemitic unrest in Romania (1907), attracted British travellers to southeastern Europe and functioned as transnational conduits through which writers discussed anxieties surrounding Britain’s perceived decline, including first-wave feminism, national efficiency, rising industrial militancy and so-called alien immigration. This thesis therefore 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. Challenging recent historical studies of representations of southeastern Europe that have generally dismissed travel literature, it furthermore provides a defence of travelogues as historical sources and advocates for more complex and historically contingent readings of the genre.