Absorbing East-Central Europe: Representations of the region in modern British literature

In this dissertation, I unpack various geopolitical stereotypes and images that were heavily employed in modern British fiction with East-Central European locales and propose that at the root of such images lay a special anxiety about Britain's position in the continental and global scene as her dominance partly hinged upon the economic subjugation of the European peripheries. By considering Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy (1960-5) in the first three chapters, I argue that the complex processes of negotiating geopolitical divides are shaped by various factors such as a desire to reassert British political and economic dominance, a nostalgia for a feudal, aristocratic world that is unaffected by the questionable practices of industrialization and vices of modernity, and even personal dilemmas stemming from the travelers' own crises of class or gender identity. In the fourth chapter--by focusing on Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest (1990), David Greig's Europe (1994), David Edgar's Pentecost (1994), and Malcolm Bradbury's Doctor Criminale (1992)--I address the challenges contemporary writers face when attempting to represent the region in a time of transition when Europe attempts to establish a continental unity devoid of its former geopolitical divisions although this effort is often halted by the still imbalanced economy of the continent and the lingering stereotypes. Ultimately, the texts I consider in this dissertation foreground the ways in which the European continent has been envisioned, its boundaries and division lines simultaneously reasserted and called into question in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fiction and travel writing. By analyzing the nature of cultural exchange between Britain and East-Central Europe in the aforementioned fictional works and travelogues, the dissertation contributes to the ongoing dialogue as we continue to negotiate the continent's internal divisions.