Imagining the Balkans

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Review
"Maria Todorova has been fast establishing herself as an eminent Balkan historian; this book confirms and strengthens that reputation....[The book is] passionate, learned, entertaining, polemical, ambitious, courageous."--Slavic Review"This is a good book. It is provocative, interesting, and informative. I recommend it."--The Journal of Modern History"[This book] contains many brilliant insights and always displays the author's enormous erudition."--Choice"Todorova's book is a passionate, provocative, and necessary attempt to retrace the construction of a pejrative image of the Balkans...[Todorova] collected and catalogued, in a densely packed volume, several centuries of travel writing, scholarly production, and political analysis by outsiders and insiders alike...One can only assume that this compelling and invigorating exploration will be the first of many attempts to explain the phenomenon of "Balkanism," the existence of which cannot be doubted."--The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Product 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.

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