The Eastern Question, Western Europe, and the Balkans in Fin-de-Siècle Literature.

Abstract

Traditionally, the British Empire is studied through the lens of British imperial rule in Asia, Africa, or the Americas, while scholars brush aside what was the vortex of British foreign policy in the second half of the nineteenth century—the Eastern Question, or the question of what to do with the Southeastern European subject peoples of the “decaying” Ottoman Empire. Reading closely late nineteenth-century British and Balkan expository prose and fiction that deal exclusively with the Eastern Question, I demonstrate that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s foreign policy was formed not only in the context of its interests overseas, but also, and perhaps more significantly, in the context of other existing empires in central Europe, as well as in the near east, such as the Russian and the Ottoman. A defining concern of this dissertation is also to demonstrate that the Balkans’ image of the other within Europe is largely a post-Enlightenment Western European construction that was discursively hardened at the end of the nineteenth century by both Western European and Balkan intellectuals. In discursive terms, I claim, this image was virtually parallel to Orientalist constructions of Western Europe’s colonial territories in Asia or Africa. My claim stems from reading in dialogue late nineteenth-century Western European texts (Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and Balkan texts (Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganio and Dobri Voinikov’s The Misunderstood Civilization). I position these texts in relation to a critical discourse of nationalism and empire, as well as examine how these texts reflect or reconstruct these notions’ accepted meanings and connotations in the second half of the nineteenth century.