SOURCE: Morgan, Peter. “Between Albanian Identity and Imperial Politics: Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams.” Modern Language Review 97, no. 2 (April 2002): 365-79.

In the following essay, Morgan proposes a critical reexamination of The Palace of Dreams, suggesting that scholars have failed to pay attention to the “socio-cultural significance of material relating to little-known Albanian and Bosnian epic traditions used by Kadare to articulate the problems of imperialistic power structures and ethnic identity during a time of political change in the Balkans.”

Ismail Kadare is one of the best known of contemporary Balkan novelists and probably the only Albanian writer known widely outside his country. Among Albanian dissidents Kadare has been a controversial figure, condemned by some on account of his ambiguous relationship with the ruling party of Enver Hoxha.¹ Nevertheless a recent commentator has written that ‘no-one who reads The Palace of Dreams, one of Kadare's greatest works, could...