Although notoriously imprecise designations dating from the nineteenth century, ‘the Balkans’ and ‘Ruritania’ have played surprisingly prominent roles in configurations of identity in modern British literature and culture. Building on existing research into cultural representations, this chapter seeks to provide a survey of British engagement with the region, real or imagined, from early modern to recent times. Drawing on a range of examples and taking into account travel accounts and historiographical texts as well as fiction, cinema, and theatre, it argues that representation of these purported regions straddled fact and fiction, as well as high and popular culture. British images of the Balkans and/or Ruritania reflected both shifts in literary currents and modes, and changes in Britain’s relationship to Europe and the world as a whole.

Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been a widespread postulate in the study of nationalism in Europe and beyond for several decades now. While some, more sociologically oriented theories have seen the creation of national cultures as a mere by-product of large-scale political and economic transformations, others have seen both the content and the form of national narratives as central to the process of creating identities. A large body of literature has now appeared addressing questions of nation and narration, whether through edited volumes or monograph studies. This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. It stresses the centrality and agency of literary, artistic and cultural practices and modes of representation. In one way or another, literary, cultural and historical narratives and artefacts have shaped national identities. They have done so not just as “content” accompanying a general sociohistorical process but by the specific nature of their means of representation and ways of transmission; and not just within but across linguistic communities.

The objects of study and interpretive methodologies applied in this collection are varied. Chapters deal inter alia not just with poetry, prose and political ideas but with painting, porcelain and popular song. They draw on examples in languages ranging from Icelandic, Arabic and German, to Irish, Hungarian, French and beyond. They study transcultural phenomena from the medieval and early modern periods to the modern and postmodern, with frequent attention to challenging conventional temporalities and periodizations.

Is ‘Eurocentrism’ a Eurocentric Term?

The terms ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Eurocentrism’, now widely used and discussed in history and cultural theory, are themselves of Western European origin. The question of when they were first used – and also where, and how – still requires clarification. Taking an approach from conceptual history, it is possible to trawl through reference works and online digital tools to pinpoint their birth and diffusion.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, identifies the first usage of the term – in the earlier form ‘Europocentric’ – in Processes of History by the Irish-born American historian and social scientist Frederick J. Teggart, published by Yale University Press in 1918. In this all-but-forgotten book, Teggart argued that ‘human history is not unitary but pluralistic; that what we are given is not one history but many and especially that the concept of “progress” is arrived at by the maintenance of a Europocentric tradition and the elimination from consideration of the activities of all peoples whose civilization does not at once appear as contributory to our own’.

That the term came to be used in a work on ‘the processes of history’ in the wake of World War I is in many ways to be expected. At this time, conceptions of European progress were coming under scrutiny in many countries both within Europe and without.

The word ‘identity’ first came into use in English in the sixteenth century, as a borrowing from French and Latin (Late Latin identitas, from idem, the same). It can denote two rather different conditions of sameness: that which subsists between two or more people or objects, which are ‘identical’ or that of a single person or object having the same distinct qualities or characteristics throughout its existence. Early usages tended to promote the first quality; the second became dominant slightly later.

These definitions might seem at first to contradict each other. One way of understanding them might be to consider that important accessory of modern travel, the passport or ‘identity document’. Such a document enables people to be distinguished as individuals, for instance, by means of a photograph, given name and number, and other details that make them unique. Reference to origin points – date and place of birth, perhaps names of parents – also imply that an individual's identity derives from unique circumstances pertaining to their creation. But passports also ‘identify’ people in a different way: as one of a group of many, perhaps citizens of a state (Caplan and Torpey 2001). Identity documents might further locate individuals in other collective categories such as gender, ethnicity or religion. In short, identity involves having a continuously distinct existence; but can also mean being one of the same ‘kind’ of people or things.

Not all philosophers accept the idea that an individual's identity is fixed and continuous. In the eighteenth century, David Hume (1739–40, I, 439–41) declared personal identity to be a fiction, ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions’, sustained by ‘operations of the imagination’. Modern theorists (e.g., Sen 2006; Younge 2010) likewise perceive identity as being an accretion of often potentially contradictory attitudes, sustained by our complex relations with others, and also by the effects of experience, socialization and other normative cultural pressures (tradition, habits and customs) or ‘epistemes’, that is, the social and intellectual apparatus which renders judgement possible. In most modern contexts, identity is acknowledged to be constructed through a mass of social interactions and acts of representation: identity is therefore ‘not an object but a process’ (Schick 1999). Reflecting this, some theorists (e.g., Brubaker and Cooper 2000) advocate the use of the term ‘identification’ over ‘identity’.

Form, deriving from Latin forma, has been in common use for centuries in all Romance and Germanic languages, as well as in many other tongues; the first English attestation is from c.1225. Roughly equivalent to ‘shape’, it can denote something's external outline, but also its essential quality or character. In literary studies, it usually refers to certain consecrated configurations – structures, patterns, sequences or styles of writing – within a given genre.

These forms imply a set of ‘norms’, or rules of literary composition in a work, conformity to which would confer respectability and success. However, genres and forms are not ‘naturally occurring’ but are ‘historically perceived’ and ‘institutionally codified’ (Todorov 1990 [1978]; Chirico 2008). More recently, the emphasis on defining genres in a normative way has largely been replaced by an understanding of the infinite diversity of forms in which cultural representations may occur. Forms can also be understood not just in terms of an author's intentions or the tastes of the period, but also in terms of how they are received (Kohanski 1996). ‘Form’ has usually been distinguished from ‘format’, the latter referring to the physical arrangement, shape or size of a publication, and the materials used, rather than the internal structure. However, scholars increasingly recognize a reciprocal relationship between physical and material conditions of production and literary form.

Travel can be recorded or represented by any number of signs in a vast array of media. Photographs, paintings, drawings, films, sound and other recording formats can bear witness to human movement; so can documents like passports, tickets and passenger records, or even traces like footprints or smells. But while the impulse to register travel experience is an age-old one, and traces of journeys can be found across almost all genres of material artefact, travel writing's history as a literary genre has not always been distinct. Most critics tackling the problem agree that travel writing partakes of a hybrid quality: it has been called ‘a broad and ever-shifting genre’ (Hulme and Youngs 2002, 10) which ‘does not seem to belong to any genre in particular’ (Borm 2004, 14). Accounts of travel can be embedded in works of history, autobiography or memoir (a quality emphasized by Fussell (1980, 203)), as well as in material artefacts.

In classical Latin, ‘persona’ meant a mask used in a theatrical performance. The term came into Old English in the thirteenth century (via Anglo-Norman parsone, parsoune, person, persoun), and was used, much as in other European languages, as a category in law, grammar and theology. ‘Personal’ and ‘personality’, also via Anglo-Norman, appeared in the fifteenth century, as did the term ‘personage’, which denoted a person in relation to their rank, appearance or generic status or type. The emergence of the term ‘parson’ for a clergyman is a curious offshoot, but shows how the word was understood to designate a role as much as a unique individual.

Surprisingly, given the term's origin and later productivity, persona was not part of theatrical terminology; and in contrast to French, ‘personage’ was only occasionally used in English to refer to a character in fiction. The term ‘dramatis personae’ was not adopted in printed plays until around the end of the seventeenth century. This was possibly influenced by European convention (there were lists of personas in Spanish plays, and of personnes/personnages in French ones), but only in English was the term persona reintroduced in its Latin form, making it distinct from ‘person’ or ‘personage’.

From here it was quickly and widely applied to real-life contexts to capture the way an outward role might be performed socially or constructed rhetorically. Usages from the 1730s in the plays of Henry Fielding and the literary criticism of Richard Bentley are already metaphorical, referring to editorial personae, or the assembled company in a scene. As part of authorial strategy, the practice could involve the adoption of a pseudonym, or the projection of certain traits within the frame of a narrator figure or individual characters. Around the same time, the term ‘personification’ emerged, bestowing a name on the already familiar artistic practice of embodying abstract concepts or inanimate objects in the form of human figures or fictional characters. These semantic developments betokened a wider institutionalization of the by-now established process of ‘self-fashioning’ (Greenblatt 1980), through both textual and visual performance. It also coincided with the rise of first-person literary fictions which very often deployed the persona of the traveller as narrator/protagonist, for instance, in the foundational novels of Defoe and Swift (Adams 1983).

The terms ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’, widely used in travel writing studies, derive from ‘colony’ and ‘empire’, but did not always have a strong ideological meaning. ‘Colony’ (mid-sixteenth century, from Latin colonia) denoted a farmstead or settlement established by a fixed body of settlers. ‘Colonial’ came into use in English in the late eighteenth century, particularly with reference to the North American colonies and their changing relationship with Great Britain. In other European languages, it often referred to goods produced in colonies and marketed in Europe (notably coffee, cotton, rice, spices, sugar, tea and tobacco). ‘Colonialism’ as an abstract noun did not appear for another century, and referred initially to informal styles and practices, such as linguistic peculiarities in spoken English (‘To use a colonialism, “the place was going ahead” ’, 1863 (Oxford English Dictionary)).

Even ‘imperialism’ initially had a fairly neutral meaning in English. An ‘imperialist’ was a representative or other person in the service of an empire – especially, in a European context, the Holy Roman Empire. In mid-nineteenth-century France, impérialiste denoted a supporter of Napoleon III's Second Empire, without notable emphasis on overseas expansion. It was only during the late nineteenth century, and principally in Britain, that the sense of a specific project or system of ‘imperialism’ developed. The prestige both of advocates such as John Seeley (The Expansion of England, 1883) and of critics such as John Hobson (Imperialism, 1902) influenced the global spread of the term from Russia to Japan (Koebner 1964; Brewer 1980). As such, ‘imperialism’ remained the more consecrated term. Paradoxically, it was only in the mid-twentieth century, when the Western colonial empires were coming apart, that the term ‘colonialism’ began to gain real prominence. Some applied it to a particular type of imperial system, one which involved population settlement and economic exploitation rather than a broader system of dominion over distant lands; ‘Western’ (Dutch, British, French and Iberian) empires were thus distinguished from ‘Eastern’ ones (Russian, Ottoman, Mughal, for example).

Numerous writers in the mid-twentieth century related colonial governance not just to political domination but to mental attitudes. A key work which both attacked colonialism as a mindset and consecrated the term was Aimé Césaire's Discours sur le colonialisme (1955 [1950]). Around the same time, Frantz Fanon (1961) sought to analyse the predicaments of colonized or recently decolonized societies from a psychological viewpoint.