num_pages: 257
description: If the Balkans hadn't existed they would have been invented was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication Europe. This book traces the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues diplomatic accounts academic surveys journalism and belles-lettres in many languages Imagining the Balkans explores the ontology of the Balkans from the eighteenth century to the present day uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed became mythologized and is still being transmitted as discourse.The author who was raised in the Balkans is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject. A region geographically inextricable from Europe yet culturally constructed as the other the Balkans have often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the European has been built. With this work Todorova offers a timely accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.
language: English
title: Imagining the Balkans
publisher: Oxford University Press