Intimate antagonists: British images of the Balkans, 1853--1914

Intimate Antagonists: British Images of the Balkans, 1853-1914, explores the impact of the Eastern Question on the formation of British stereotypes about the Balkans, seeking to explain how the Balkans came to be seen as a disgrace to Europe. It advances the previous studies on the Balkans by illuminating the relationship between the emerging discourse on the Balkans and the bourgeois ideology about Britishness. It presents an argument that intense identifications and disidentifications with the Balkan other were a result of conflicting political, racial, religious, and geographical bonds between the Balkans and the West. This study further analyzes how British conflictual relations with Russia and the Ottoman Empire complicate British perceptions of the Balkans. While seemingly on the margins of Europe, the Balkans were central to preserving political stability in Europe and to defining what it meant to be European.; While acknowledging its debt to the Saidian model, this dissertation maintains that the discourse on the Balkans is distinct from the Orientalist discourse. In the Balkan Christian affiliations and geographical and racial bonds with the West, the "orientalized" Balkan other challenges the notions of Europeanness in more unsettling ways that the Oriental other does. Through the analysis of a diverse body of cultural discourse---political debates, travel narratives, fiction, and newspaper and journal articles, this study proposes that the disillusionment about the ability of the Balkan other to meet the Western standard of civilization contributes to the formation of particularly negative images of the Balkans. The perceived similarity between the Balkans and the West leads to the ever stronger need to disown the connection with the Balkans.