IngentaConnect 'Something in the View Which Makes You Linger': Bohemia and Bohem...

Abstract:

Though largely overlooked in the scholarly literature, a fair few British mid-nineteenth-century travellers produced travelogues from their visits to Bohemia. Their descriptions of political and national conditions in the country allow for a reconstruction of prevalent British attitudes to Bohemia, its history, and population, and for some conclusions regarding trends in how the visitors experienced national conditions there. From the outset, all writers brought with them a rather solid knowledge of older Bohemian history in particular, and a very consistent framework for interpreting this, marked by anti-Catholicism, dislike of the Habsburgs, and sympathy for the Czechs as noble, if ultimately tragically defeated defenders of religious and political freedom. Historically, the existence of a Czech nation in Bohemia was thus taken for granted, but until the 1840s few travellers reported actually having met Czechs, or to have noticed the presence of two different nationalities in Bohemia. Only the revolution of 1848-49 brought accounts that held nationality to be a potent political force. Also, although all authors noticed the Czech linguistic and racial belonging to the larger family of Slavs, we find few generalizing stereotypes about Slavs, and no signs of any stigmatizing, semi-orientalist ascriptions of otherness to the Czechs, or to Bohemia. The travelogues uniformly describe Bohemia as belonging to German Central Europe, and only after 1848 do we meet the first associations of Czechs with Eastern Europe.

The full text electronic article is available for purchase. You will be able to download the full text electronic article after payment.

$39.00 plus tax Refund Policy

'Something in the View Which Makes You Linger': Bohemia and Bohemians in British Travel Writing, 1836-1857