Vol. 4 · No. 1

Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria

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Abstract

Overall, the picture presented by nineteenth-century British travel narratives about the Balkans is far from pleasing to the present-day multiculturalist sensibility. At first glance, Victorian attitudes to food seem to confirm well-known inferences about ethnocentrism, intolerance and imperialism. However, my reading of specific texts demonstrates that such inferences can sometimes obscure an underlying complexity and thus prove misleading. As has been shown above, certain morally ambiguous stances were intimately linked to travellers' bids for self-empowerment or to rhetorical manoeuvres focused on the establishment of their credentials with their own readers. In the case of 'liberal' travellers, such as Irby and Mackenzie, who were concerned with local issues of national emancipation and progress, such bids and manoeuvres often contributed to their texts' favourable reception in the British context and to the furtherance of their social projects. Issues of ethics and travel gained a new dimension in writings marked by an incipient multiculturalist consciousness. While the narrators of such texts managed to rise above certain forms of culturally conditioned prejudice, they failed in dealing with ethical dilemmas involving transgressions of sexual and ethnic boundaries. In the last analysis, a reading of Victorian attitudes to Balkan food may be said to demonstrate the complexity of cultural and political motives, modes, means and ways.