Imagining the Balkans - Softcover

Outstanding. (Misha Glenny, London Review of Books)

Passionate, learned, entertaining, polemical, ambitious, courageous. (Slavic Review)

Contains many brilliant insights and always displays the author's enormous erudition. (CHOICE)

Todorova's book is a passionate, provocative, and necessary attempt to retrace the construction of a pejorative image of the Balkans. (Nicholas J. Miller, Journal of Interdisciplinary History)

Full of challenging ideas, forcefully presented opinions, references for further reading, and enlightening observations. (Gale Stokes, H-Net)

By far the best work of historiography on the region. (Tomislav Z. Longinovic, Lingua Franca)

[Imagining the Balkans] gained the status of a classic and it can certainly be regarded as one of the most influential books about (Southeast) European history of the past decades ... Maria Todorova's book has not lost in importance in the 20 years since it was published. It was a 'must-read' when it came out and it remains so today. (Hannes Grandits, Reviews in History)

"If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented" was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication, Europe. Over ten years ago, Maria Todorova traced the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belles-lettres in many languages, Imagining the Balkans explored the ontology of the Balkans from the sixteenth century to the present day, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is still being transmitted as discourse.

Maria Todorova, who was raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject, and in a new afterword she reflects on recent developments in the study of the Balkans and political developments on the ground since the publication of Imagining the Balkans. The afterword explores the controversy over Todorova's coining of the term Balkanism. With this work, Todorova offers a timely, updated, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.