This volume focuses on Serbia's need to manage change while preserving community identities, a narrative that avoids the common depiction of Serbian culture as a hostile struggle between modernizers supporting foreign models and traditionalists advocating forms of national cultural patrimony.
Traditions only function if they are allowed to bend to the necessary modifications demanded by a community's changing historical circumstances. Tradition and change are two sides of the same coin which Serbia, in its many different incarnations, has experienced over the centuries, protecting its national heritage while borrowing and adapting intellectual and other trends from Byzantine, Ottoman and Western sources. Outside influences have been imposed as a direct result of foreign rule or through more friendly channels of communication, leading to a complex relationship between autochthonous and alien elements in Serbian society and culture. This book argues that the division between the national and international frameworks has often been a false dichotomy, with outside features embedded in domestic symbolic capital and Serbian culture simultaneously determined on local, national, regional and global levels.
David A. Norris's approach offers a new perspective to students, academics and general readers interested in the history of Serbia's participation in the broad networks of cultural exchange.
ISBN: | 9781138344013 |
Publication date: | 5th March 2024 |
Author: | David A Norris |
Publisher: | Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis |
Format: | Hardback |
Pagination: | 244 pages |
Series: | Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe |
Genres: |
Regional / International studies Second World War Social and political philosophy Modern warfare Far-left political ideologies and movements Nationalism Far-right political ideologies and movements European history Regional geography History and Archaeology |