Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Literary and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanian and Balkan social, cultural and literary history; on travel writing and circulation of ideas and images; and on European identity as a whole.

• Foreword Wendy Bracewell, Alex Drace-Francis 1. Towards a natural history of east European travel writing Alex Drace-Francis 2. The travel narrative as a (literary) genre David Chirico 3. The limits of Europe in east European travel writing Wendy Bracewell 4. ‘They are laughing at us’: Hungarian travellers and early modern European identity Graeme Murdock 5. Travels through the Slav world Wendy Bracewell 6. The Odyssey of national discovery: Hungarians in Hungary and abroad, 1750-1850 Irina V. Popova-Nowak 7. European identity and Romantic irony: Juliusz Slowacki’s journey to Greece Maria Kalinowska 8. Metaphor and monumentality: The travels of Nicolae Iorga Andi Mihalache 9. Oh, to be a European! What Rastko Petrovic learnt in Africa Zoran Milutinovic 10. Excursions into national specificity and European identity: Mihail Sebastian’s interwar travel reportage ,iana Georgescu 11. The Cold-War traveller’s gaze: Jan Lenica’s 1954 sketchbook of London Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius 12. Images of the West in Bulgarian travel writing during socialism (1945-1989) Rossitza Guentcheva Notes on contributors