In the wake of Saids Orientalism, literary and cultural scholars turned to Ivo Andrics Bosnia as a world between the civilized West and the Ottoman East, often contributing to stylizing this region as an Orientalist antechamber. This is clearly a misinterpretation of Andric, as are the attacks on him as a supporter of Nazism. Milutinovic convincingly shows that Andric was always diplomatic, in the sense that he made observations without taking sides and pointed out patterns without painting any in a better light. This study is therefore not only a critique of the contemporary Islamic reconquista of multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Bosnia, but also a warning against turning to Bosnia as a pocket of the Orient in the European Occident. * Ivana Perica, Research Fellow, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Germany * Milutinovics study of both authors is an important contribution to debates about the abuse of literary criticism for political purposes, while offering insight into Bosniak nationalist discourse, and supplementing extant scholarship on the literary work of Petar Petrovic Njego and Ivo Andric. * Modern Language Review *
