[ Call for Papers | Applications ]

We need a person (possibly a native speaker) capable of editing an English collection of scholarly essays dedicated to the history, cultures and societies on the Balkans (these are the results of NEXUS project - for a detailed information about NEXUS please check our website).
Since we have to sign the contract urgently the deadline for
applications is Monday, 12 September 2005. Please send us your CV, two pages of edited text (please find below) and your expectation for payment per standard page (1800 characters).

Sincerely yours,
Alexander Kiossev
NEXUS Convener
CAS Permanent fellow

TEXT FOR EDITING:
THE BALKAN FICTIONAL HISTORY: NO MORE EUROPEAN, NOT ONLY OTTOMAN, AND NOT YET NATIONAL
A Case Study on the Historical Novel

Introduction
In the final chapter of "Imagining the Balkans" (1997), while advancing arguments to the concept of the Balkans as an Ottoman legacy, Maria Todorova wrote: "Turning to the Ottoman legacy as perception, it has been and is being shaped by generations of historians, poets, writers, journalists and other intellectuals." In the Bulgarian edition (1999) there is a paragraph with names pointed out - Ivo Andric, Dimitar Talev, Dobrica Chosic, Nikos Kazandzakis, and Anton Donchev. No doubt that especially the Bulgarian names directly evoke the notion of the historical novel.
The historical novel provides many ways of interpretation of the figurative plot pictures, considering the Balkans, because it seems to be in a strange "in-between" position. On one hand, the historical novel also has its "genre" legacy - that of the romantic thought, which is supposed to produce nationalist impacts from Sir Walter Scott up to now.
So, the genre spreads retrospectively its modern foundations,
elaborating retrospective "national" images in times when they could not be seen in the proper sense. On the other hand, the genre keeps the background of the Great history and its statements - and the Great history invented "the Balkans" by naming them no earlier than the beginning of the nineteenth century, alongside with the notion of different peoples inhabiting them (the range of ethnonyms unshaped into nation-states is very wide here). So, the name was given within the functioning processes of national divisions, which is perhaps the clearest feature of their "europeanization", and probably of their "end"; "if the Balkans are, as I think they are, tantamount to their Ottoman legacy, this [their 'europeanization'] is an advanced stage of the end of the Balkans" (M. Todorova). So the very task of this text will be to observe "the Balkans" within the plots of the historical novels as "crucified" between the genre's imagination and the genre's legacy.
Thus the first step is obviously paradoxical, following the paradoxes of the genre - the texts are supposed to be "nationalist" without speaking about the "nation", "Balkan" without speaking about the Balkans, etc.; and they should ensure the plot of a "history" which is no more European, not only Ottoman, and not yet national. The Balkans appear to be very vague under the conditions of such a vague fictional perspective, and exactly because of that very interesting.
Pressed between the historical discourse (of "Europe") and the nationalist impact of the genre, the Balkans seem to disappear from literality and to appear in the figurative - the observation of that appearance/disappearance is a very seductive task that aims at revealing their areas and boundaries of representation in the fictional texts.
Because of that the paper will pay a special attention to the uses of the very terms "Balkans" and "history" in the novels.
Outstripping the very observations, I must say that the genre has no problem to mention often "the Balkan" (the mountain range of Stara Planina, especially in the Bulgarian examples), but there is no trace of the very name "the Balkans" in them. The term "Balkans" or "Balkan peninsula" is missing totally also in Andric's "The Days of the Consuls"; its frequent appearance towards the end of "The Bridge on the Drina" is commented below.
The novels chosen here are only four: Ivo Andric's "The Bridge on the Drina" (1945) and "The Days of the Consuls" (1945), Anton Donchev's "Time of Parting" (1964), and Vera Mutafchieva's "Chronicle of the Commotion Time" (1965-66). The choice is dictated by the secondary (expanding on the intertextual approach) range of their plot times: "The Bridge on the Drina" deals with the 16th-20th century period, "Time of
Parting" with the 17th century, "Chronicle of the Commotion time" - with the end of the 18th c. and the beginning of the 19th c. and "The Days of the Consuls" - with the beginning of the 19th c. To construct such a temporal range is not the very aim, or at least the only aim of this research work (in such a case only "The Bridge on the Drina" will be entirely sufficient). The paper attempts to keep in mind the different patterns emerging by the overlap of the plots' temporalities in the "network" of the different texts - and to compare not the "events" of the histories, but the modes of speech and the figurative representations coming out of them.
The importance of the genre lies also in its double game with time - the time of writing and the plot time meet in always interesting figuratives and often harden into different formulae, as our "time of parting", "commotion time" or "time of the consuls" are. The "times" also always create notions of space (and the contrary), which cannot coincide with the ethnonymic one. The "time of parting" evokes the notion of the Rhodopes in a plot of forced change of faith; the