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Antiquity has often been perceived as the source of Greece's modern achievements, as well as its frustrations, with the continuity between ancient and modern Greek culture and the legacy of classical Greece in Europe dominating and shaping current perceptions of the classical past.
By moving beyond the dominant perspectives on the Greek past, this edited volume shifts attention to the ways this past has been constructed, performed, (ab)used, Hellenized, canonized, and ultimately decolonized and re-imagined. For the contributors, re-imagining the past is an opportunity to critically examine and engage imaginatively with various approaches. Chapters explore both the role of antiquity in texts and established cultural practices and its popular, material and everyday uses, charting the transition in the study of the reception of antiquity in modern Greek culture from an emphasis on the continuity of the past to the recognition of its diversity.
Incorporating a number of chapters which adopt a comparative perspective, the volume re-imagines Greek antiquity and invites the reader to look at the different uses and articulations of the past both in and outside Greece, ranging from literature to education, and from politics to photography.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- 1: Dimitris Tziovas: Introduction: decolonizing antiquity, heritage politics and performing the past
- Part I: Antiquity, Greece, and Europe
- 2: Anastasia Stouraiti: Collecting the past: Greek antiquaries and archaeological knowledge in the Venetian Empire
- 3: Roderick Beaton: Re-imagining Greek antiquity in 1821: Shelley's Hellas in its literary and political context
- 4: Alexandra Lianeri: A syncretic antiquity in translation: polis and political modernity in conflict in nineteenth-century Greek Antigones
- Part II: Hellenisms, Institutions, and Politics
- 5: Tassos A. Kaplanis: Antique names and self-identification: Hellenes, Graikoi and Romaioi from late Byzantium to the Greek nation-state
- 6: Peter Mackridge: The Christian Hellenism and linguistic archaism of Neofytos Doukas
- 7: Vangelis Karamanolakis: The University of Athens and Greek antiquity (1837-1937)
- 8: Alexander Kazamias: Antiquity as cold war propaganda: the political uses of the classical past in post-civil war Greece
- Part III: Material Culture and Performance
- 9: Dimitris Plantzos: Dead archaeologists, buried gods: archaeology as an agent of modernity in Greece
- 10: Eleana Yalouri: In the spirit of matter: re-connecting to antiquity in the Greek present
- 11: Katerina Zacharia: Postcards from Metaxas' Greece: the uses of classical antiquity in tourism photography
- 12: Eleni Papazoglou: Between texts and contexts: moderns against ancients in the reception of ancient tragedy in Greece (1900-1933)
- Part IV: Literary Receptions of Antiquity
- 13: Gonda Van Steen: Sin and the City: a mid-fifteenth-century lament for the fall of Athens to the 'Persians'
- 14: David Ricks: Lucretian moments in modern Greek poetry
- 15: Gunnar de Boel: Rethinking the Greek Legacy: Dorians in modern Greek fiction
- 16: Marinos Pourgouris: Yannis Ritsos, Marxist dialectics and the re-imagining of Ancient Greece
- 17: Dimitris Tziovas: The wound of history: Ritsos and the reception of Philoctetes
- 18: Rowena Fowler: Plato, Seferis and Heaney: poetry as redress
- Part V: Greek Culture and Classical Reception
- 19: Lorna Hardwick: Exceptionalities and paradigms: ancient and modern Greek culture in classical reception research
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Dimitris Tziovas is Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham
Summary
By moving beyond the dominant perspectives on the Greek past, this volume re-imagines Greek antiquity and invites the reader to look at the different uses and articulations of the past both in and outside Greece, ranging from literature to education, and from politics to photography.
Additional text
This collection expands the discussion of classical reception further in the Modern Greek world, not narrowing the argument to literature, but enriching the research fields, including history, arts, and humanities in general ... embedding cultural studies in the contemporary discourse.
