Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

Southeastern Europe is better known as the Balkans, although this name has historically been problematized and often acquired negative connotations. Maria Todorova's seminal study on the Balkans, Imagining the Balkans (1997), has, for example, analyzed both the category itself and the various negative connotations assigned to the region. The region is imagined as a more or less compact entity due to historical developments that marked it, primarily the Ottoman colonization, but also the many episodes of turbulent history since the formation of modern nation-states. Cultural development in the region that has, for the most part, been a polygon of conflicts for the world powers, has suffered a certain dose of “belatedness” relative to European mainstream influences, as Gregory Jusdanis controversially claims about modern Greek culture in Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture (1991). Most importantly, culture in the Balkans has rarely had the luxury of avoiding the grip of history and evolving with independent aesthetic attributes. The few periods of relatively unhindered literary and cultural developments created a sense of time compression that sometimes prevented literary styles that had almost run parallel courses from maturing to their full distinction. With many nation-states comprising the region, the number of which has multiplied since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, ... log in or subscribe to read full text