Orientalism and nostalgia in british travel writing on the balkans

The main purpose of this study is to examine the orientalist and nostalgic conditions as well as images reflected in British travel writers, specifically in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel trilogy consisting of A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and Water (1986) and A Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (2013), and Georgina Harding’s In Another Europe: A Journey into Romania (1990). This work mainly utilizes theories regarding orientalism such as those of Edward Said, Andre Gingrich and Maria Todorova, in addition to Joep Leerssen’s theory of imagology and Svetlana Boym’s theories of nostalgia. Furthermore, this thesis aspires to underline the orientalist conditions in the said works, by providing imagological examples that support these conditions and how they interact with nostalgic conditions felt or observed by authors. The orientalist conditions are handled in correlation with the conditions of the interwar period and the end of the cold war while the images reproduced by various peoples are underlined as contributing factors for both orientalist and nostalgic discourses