The Image Building of a Nation: Albania as an Imaginary Country in Fictional Representations

Résumé 0

In the field of Balkan Studies, the French writer and scholar Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) is renowned for his La Guzla ou Choix de poesies illyriques, recueillies dans la Dalmatie, la Bosnie, la Croatie et l’Hertzegowine (1827), a collection of allegedly old Balkan songs he published under a fictional name. In an age of successful literary hoaxes to which Macpherson’s Ossian had paved the way, the pretended discovery of folk ballads from a still little known European area proved to be exciting not only to scholars but also to a larger public. On the other hand, his contribution to the field of Albanian studies as well as to the spread of Albanian topics in European literature is much less known. These are precisely the objects of our proposal. Regarding the first point, in 1854 Mérimée reviewed for French readers Georg von Hahn’s Albanesische Studien rather thoroughly (and sharply) in one of the most prestigious French literary magazines. As it appears, it was from this essay that the consul Auguste Dozon drew the word “chkipe”, the French transliteration of the endonym “Shqiptar” he used in his seminal work Manuel de la Langue Chkipe ou Albanaise (1879).The second aspect our proposal deals with concerns the influence Mérimée exerted on the creation of a short story by Mary Shelley, which is one of the first specimens of English gothic novels inspired from Albanian topics.