SERBIA AND THE BALKANS: THREE CENTURIES OF EMBRACE WITH EUROPE, [pp. 187-196]
AUTHOR(S) / AUTOR(I): Vesna Goldsworthy
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DOI: 10.46793/7494.189.187G
ABSTRACT / SAŽETAK:
Balkan nationalisms, unlike similar feelings elsewhere in Europe, continue to be described as uniquely inexplicable, a set of irrational “ancient hatreds.” That perception has remained virtually un- changed since the turn of the twentieth century. The Balkan Peninsula remains a resolutely peripheral, and an ideal foil for articulations of European superiority. Two hundred and fifty Ruritanian films were produced in the first three decades of cinema, and half of those were US productions. That amplification, which continues to this day and now includes computer games and AI-generated visual production, is at the crux of the argument presented in Inventing Ruritania (1998), my study of British literary stereotypes of the Balkans from Lord Byron up to the Cold War. The Balkans are no longer faraway places of which we know little. The persistence of Balkan stereotypes is perhaps, therefore, a product less of a lack of contact than of power relations.
KEYWORDS / KLJUČNE REČI:
the Balkans, Ruritania, stereotypes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT / PROJEKAT:
REFERENCES / LITERATURA:
- Christie, Agatha, Murder on the Orient Express (London: William Collins, 1990, 1st ed. 1934).
- Durham, Edith, TheBurdenoftheBalkans (London: Thomas Nelson, 1905).
- Hope, Anthony, ThePrisonerofZenda (Bristol and London: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1984).
- Goldsworthy, Vesna, Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism ofthe Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
- Le Carré, John, Silverview (London: Viking, 2021).
- Shaw, George Bernard, Arms and the Man (London: Longman Literature 1991). First performed 1894.
- Stoker, Bram, Dracula (London: Penguin Books, 1979, 1st ed. 1897).