Romania Redefined in British Travel Narratives

Remaining in relative obscurity until the early nineteenth century, the Danube Principalities were persistently viewed as a region inhabited by citizens of the Ottoman Empire that epitomised all the negative qualities attached to Eastern Europe: having no direct connection to the Greek and Slavic cultures that bordered Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, Romanians were often subjected to the most severe scrutiny by British travellers who ventured into this part of the Balkan Peninsula. In juxtaposition with other Balkan nations such as the Greeks and Serbians whose national struggle was met with the sympathy of European intellectuals, the Romanian-speaking populations were often demonised, persistently ignored, or systematically represented on the basis of their state of vassalage to the nearby empires. This volume pertains to the representations of Romania in ten British travelogues which approached Romanianness from different angles: triggering the image of the decadent Oriental Other, the Romanian political context was explored in tune with the interests of the British expansionist agenda and through the lens of the Anglo-Saxon racial discourse that occupied a prevalent position in Victorian imagination.