British Travellers Stick Together – Olivia Manning’s Gulliver in the Balkans
British Travellers Stick Together – Olivia Manning’s Gulliver in the Balkans

Summary/Abstract: This paper involves discovering how Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy has mapped the image of Romania and mostly draws upon the sections of the trilogy in which pre-war Bucharest was memorialized as a blend of Orient and Occident, where the native population coexists with an amalgam of various other nations. Upon the examination of Harriet Pringle, the central figure of the sequence, it becomes clear that there is a connection to Swift’s Gulliver in that both characters embark on a process of “literary colonisation”. This focus establishes Manning’s place among the British travel writers by reviewing the main ideas that stem from the substantial body of work concerned with her trilogy. The article makes frequent reference back to Olivia Manning’s biography, since her narrative is admittedly based on the writer’s personal odyssey in Bucharest. Through identifying the crossover character of Manning’s prose, this research highlights its relevance for the fictional construct.

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