Twelve studies explicitly developed to elaborate on travel writing published in book form by east Europeans travelling in Europe from ca. 1550 to 2000. How did east Europeans have positioned themselves with relation to the notion of Europe, and how has the genre of travel writing served as a means of exploring and disseminating these ideas?

Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Literary and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanian and Balkan social, cultural and literary history; on travel writing and circulation of ideas and images; and on European identity as a whole.

Foreword Wendy Bracewell, Alex Drace-Francis 1. Towards a natural history of east European travel writing Alex Drace-Francis 2. The travel narrative as a (literary) genre David Chirico 3. The limits of Europe in east European travel writing Wendy Bracewell 4. ‘They are laughing at us’: Hungarian travellers and early modern European identity Graeme Murdock 5. Travels through the Slav world Wendy Bracewell 6. The Odyssey of national discovery: Hungarians in Hungary and abroad, 1750-1850 Irina V. Popova-Nowak 7. European identity and Romantic irony: Juliusz Slowacki’s journey to Greece Maria Kalinowska 8. Metaphor and monumentality: The travels of Nicolae Iorga Andi Mihalache 9. Oh, to be a European! What Rastko Petrovic learnt in Africa Zoran Milutinovic 10. Excursions into national specificity and European identity: Mihail Sebastian’s interwar travel reportage Diana Georgescu 11. The Cold-War traveller’s gaze: Jan Lenica’s 1954 sketchbook of London Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius 12. Images of the West in Bulgarian travel writing during socialism (1945-1989) Rossitza Guentcheva Notes on contributors