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Zusatztext Detailed and compelling. I’m impressed by Foster’s deft analysis of British imaginative geography and the emergence of Anglo-British identity against ethnographic and cultural rhetoric about the moral virtue of South Slavic peasants prior to and during the First World War. This is an effective way of tracking British anxieties about its place in “civilization’s moral hierarchy” as Britain became an urban and industrialized nation. This transnational study expands our understanding of how depictions of foreign places and peoples in popular culture contribute to wider discursive formulations of twentieth century national identities, in this case Anglo-British identity. Informationen zum Autor Samuel Foster is a Visiting Scholar at the University of East Anglia! UK! from where he obtained his PhD in History. An exploration of the link between perceptions of British identity and foreign cultures in the formation of the first Yugoslavia. Zusammenfassung Despite Britain entering the 20th century as the dominant world power, public discourses were imbued with a cultural pessimism and rising social anxiety. Through this study, Samuel Foster explores how this changing domestic climate shaped perceptions of other cultures, and Britain's relationship to them, focusing on those Balkan territories that formed the first Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1941. Yugoslavia in the British Imagination examines these connections and demonstrates how the popular image of the region's peasantry evolved from that of foreign 'Other' to historical victim - suffering at the hand of modernity's worst excesses and symbolizing Britain's perceived decline. This coincided with an emerging moralistic sense of British identity that manifested during the First World War. Consequently, Yugoslavia was legitimized as the solution to peasant victimization and, as Foster's nuanced analysis reveals, enabling Britain's imagined (and self-promoted) revival as civilization's moral arbiter.Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival sources, this compelling transnational analysis is an important contribution to the study of British social history and the nature of statehood in the modern Balkans. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsOrthographyIntroduction Part I. The Era of the Fin de Siecle 1. Themes and Contexts before the 20th Century2. Allegorising Edwardian Anxiety before 19143. Victimhood and the Changing Meaning of Archetypes Part II. The Great War 4. The British and the Balkan Front5. Peasant Martyrdom and Yugoslavia in Wartime Propaganda Part III. The Post- and Interwar Decades 6. Yugoslavia in the 'Unofficial' Mind7. Towards the Next Crisis? EpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex...
