The issue of mental mapping of Eastern Europe (Wolff 1994), posed during the Enlightenment, and the similar problem of the image of the Balkans as a periphery of Europe (Todorova 1997), are both multifaceted. This paper is dealing with just one of their various aspects – the image of the Balkans as seen from certain typical European view-points and reactions to that image in Bulgaria. The reactions to the images forged somewhere in “Europe” stem from two opposed attitudes, of acceptance and of rejection.
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The paper argues that historic myths and myths of origin, being an essential part of national mythology, are neither the first to emerge nor the only one. Furthermore, as a general rule, there are often several variations of the narration about the past of a nation that are evolving and compete for the dominant position.In an attempt to evade the polemics the author analyses some Bulgarian aspects of the crucial problem about the evolution and competition among these variations of national mythology comparing them with analogical Balkan phenomena. In all these countries there are mythical narrations about the ancient times, about Christian Middle Ages and Byzantium, about the struggle for an independent state, etc. They were arguing for primacy in the beginning; later some ideologists of the nation managed to build one relatively stable synthesis.
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The paper deals with some methodological problems in literary history and searches for their analogues and connections in historiography. What defines a text as literature? What does literary history really examine? The centuries-old unity of Bulgarian literature – does it really exist and what are its boundaries in time and space? The paper questions some established notions about these topics and suggests that such questions and doubts are related to the historiography.
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Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary, and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius‘s On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age. The author analyzes this development in a very broad cultural and philosophical scale. This review presents the monograph of the so-called New Historicism and its possible applications in Bulgarian scholarship.
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This paper examines the dynamics of ideas on the beginnings of Bulgaria, such as were developed by early nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Surveys show that there were different theses which competed tacitly. It is immediately noticeable that the figure of the Founder was imposed with difficulty and relatively late – in fact not until the 20th century. Paisius of Hilendar and the other authors of early histories presented Bulgarians in the context of Biblical history, and thus the beginning of Bulgarian time was associated with Noah and his sons. This idea was not openly attacked by successive generations, but they alternatively associated Bulgarian time and Bulgaria with the medieval kingdom, and especially with the baptism and deeds of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Among pre-Christian rulers, Khan emerges as significant, presented as Law-Maker and great Warrior, but not as Founder. It is typical for the nationalism of any ideological (and not only ideological) structure to strive for extension – in this case to seek its starting point at an ever earlier date. This proces can also be observed in the structures of Bulgarian nationalism: in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries there was a clear focus on the time before the Founder Khan Asparukh (7th century), and scholars and journalists still take pleasure in finding older Bulgarian states. However, before the founding of the Principality of Bulgaria (1878), the opposite was true. (Some) representatives of the revolutionary movement in fact rejected the medieval period and preferred to focus on more recent periods, if not on their time itself and even on the immediate future. More or less unexpectedly, this idea was re-vitalised in the late 20th century with the catch-phrase “the most Bulgarian time” associated with the 1870s.
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Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Domestic Frontiers. Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013, 214 р. ISBN 978‑1‑55849-981-2
Women in the protestant missions and modernisation in the Balkans.
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