The problems discussed in this book include the methodology of East Central European studies, the influence of the colonial hegemon on the range of topics scholars were permitted to take on, oral history, differences between Western European colonialism and the white-on-white colonialism practiced by Russia and Germany in Eastern Europe, and the creation of a mythology of lost excellence in territories subjected to colonialism.

Several essays in this collection refer directly to these historical trajectories, while others are conditioned by them even if references to colonialism are missing. Yet European history has been written as if these nations did not exist and their peoples and strivings contributed nothing to Europe’s development.

They disappeared from and reappeared on the map of Europe depending on who lost or won a consecutive war for independence. Over the last two centuries, East Central European nations have arguably been subjected to the colonial and imperial drive of their neighbors. This essay attempts to elucidate the unconventional character of 'sentimental' travel narratives and bring to the fore thematic continuities between Sterne and his twentieth-century successors. It is both a physical and psychological experience and a literary practice which allows the authors/narrators to distance themselves from cultural clichés and dogmas of their time and venture beyond social routines. Despite the differences between their texts, in all of them the journey appears not only as a narrative device, but also a symbol of the never-ending quest for individual freedom, self-knowledge and erotic fulfilment. The authors engage in a dialogue with Sterne and the literary model he proposed in his works. This essay examines the idea of the journey in Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) and the manner in which it has been referred to and elaborated upon by three twentieth-century writers: Italo Svevo in Corto viaggio sentimentale (Short Sentimental Journey, 1925), Gregor von Rezzori in Kurze Reise übern langen Weg: eine Farce (The Orient-Express, 1986) and Claudio Magris in Danubio (Danube, 1986).

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