Paper Abstract
As is well known, a Romanian national movement developed in the nineteenth century, as a process accompanying the formation of an independent state alongside several others in Central and Southeastern Europe. Independence involved international recognition by Europe’s ‘Great Powers’ on the level of international politics; but is also reflected in the personal experiences of Romanians who sought through travel and education to place themselves, both literally and figuratively, in ‘the Great European Family’. Travellers often reported being misidentified as Slavs, Turks, Russians or other as nationalities, and adopted different strategies to cope with this, be they of indignation, irony, imitation or indifference. Based on a broad selection of accounts of travels to Britain, France and Germany in the period 1825-1900, this paper will try to show the importance of both travel and writing to identity formation, understood as a rhetorical process in relation to, and sometimes in rejection of, European norms and templates.
Biography
Alex Drace–Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published books on Romanian political and cultural development, on European travel writing, and on the history of the idea of Europe. Most recently he contributed to the Routledge History of East-Central Europe (2017), to theCambridge History of Travel Writing (2019) and to the volume Keywords in Travel Writing (both 2019).
