Abstract
In his amusing travel book of 1875, the mysteriously initialled R.H.R describes how he decided to relax after what he considered to have been one of the best meals of his life at the Russian consulate in Cattaro, Dalmatia: ‘I got another chair, and stretched my legs on it; the natives stared — no Oriental ever thinks of stretching his legs — the acme of comfort for him is to tuck them under him.’1 This distinction between an ‘Oriental’ and a Western custom is designed to show the exotic nature of his location — what can be more exotic than a difference of custom in a function which for most of us seems natural, not cultural? — but also to define the area in which the traveller finds himself: it is a part of the Orient, and he is amongst Orientals. Few people today would define the Dalmatian coast (now southern Croatia and Montenegro) as ‘Oriental’, although they would not hesitate, I should think, to describe it as ‘Balkan’, and a part of ‘Eastern Europe’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
R.H.R., Rambles in Istria, Dalmatia and Montenegro (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1875), p. 160.
Wolff, Larry, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 17.
Kinglake, Alexander, Eothen (London: George Rutledge and Sons, 1905), p. 1.
Woods, H. Charles, The Danger Zone of Europe: Changes and Problems in the Near East (London and Leipsic: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911), p. 7.
[A] tottering and untoward neighbour’ as the otherwise Turcophile Stratford described it just before the Treaty of Berlin (1878) — de Redcliffe, Viscount Stratford, The Eastern Question: Being a Selection from his Writings During the Last Five Years ofHis Life, with a preface by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (London: John Murray, 1881), p. 6.
Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 22.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 14.
In one chapter of his The Spirit of the East, called ‘Social Intercourse with the Turks’, Urquhart also argues that the Turks have gained a negative image from some European travellers because their religion forbids them from having too much intercourse with Europeans and because the majority of West Europeans they meet are quacks and charlatans. Acquaintance shows them to be a worthy people — Urquhart, David, The Spirit of the East: A Journal of Travels through Roumali, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1838), I 362–4. He argues, at the end, that European powers should be helping and encouraging them rather than condemning them (I 369–70).
Linda Colley also details the accounts of travellers like Major Lowe, who registered in 1801 a great fear and respect for the Turks and the insurmountability of the Ottoman Empire — Colley, Linda, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 133.
Cunningham, Allan, ‘Stratford Canning and the Treaty of Bucharest’ in Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution, collected Essays, [Allan Cunningham] ed. Edward Ingram, 2 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1995) I 144–87, at 179–80.
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 36: pt 1: Sect. VII.
Punter, David, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 104–5.
Barbour, Judith, ‘Dr John William Polidori, Author of the Vampire’, Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism, eds Peter Otto and Deirdre Coleman (West Cornwall CT: Locust Hill Press, 1992), pp. 85–110, at p. 86.
Twitchell, James, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1981), pp.10–12.
Leatherdale, Clive, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend, rev. edn (Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1988), pp. 173–4.
Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 170–3.
Arata, Stephen D., ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’, Victorian Studies, 33:4 (1990) 621–45, at 634.
Hughes, William, ‘A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, eds Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basinstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 88–102, at p. 91.
de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 13.
Jameson, Fredric, ‘Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986), The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 315–40, at p. 320.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 129–30.
Feval, Paul, La Vampire (Castelnau-le-Lez: Bibliotheque Ombres, 2004), pp. 12–16.
Feval, Paul, Le Chevalier Tenebre, Suivi de La Ville Vampire (Verviers: Marabout,1972, p. 118).
Quoted in Nodier, Charles, Infernalia: ou Anecdotes, Petits Romans Nouvelles et Contes, sur les Revenants, les Spectres, les Demons et les Vampires, preface by de Hubert Juin (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1966), p. 177.
Féval, Paul The Vampire Countess, trans. and ed. Brian Stableford (Encino CA: Black Coat Press, 2003), pp. 22–3.
For information on the political background see the introduction to Feval, Paul, Knightshade [Le Chevalier Tenebrel, trans. and ed. Brian Stableford (Mountain Ash: Sarob Press, 2001), p. xvii.
Copyright information
© 2006 Matthew Gibson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gibson, M. (2006). Introduction. In: Dracula and the Eastern Question. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627680_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627680_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54441-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62768-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)