Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the very meaning of Europe has been opened up and is in the process of being redefined. European states and societies are wrestling with the expansion of NATO and the European Union and with new streams of immigration, while a renewed and reinvigorated cultural engagement has emerged between East and West. But the fast-paced transformations of the last 15 years also have deeper historical roots. The reconfiguring of contemporary Europe is entwined with the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, two world wars, the Holocaust, and with the processes of modernity that, since the eighteenth century, have shaped Europe and its engagement with the rest of the world.Studies in European Culture and History is dedicated to publishing books that explore major issues in Europe's past and present from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. The works in the series are interdisciplinary; they focus on culture and society and deal with significant developments in Western and Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century to the present within a social historical context. With its broad span of topics, geography, and chronology, the series aims to publish the most interesting and innovative work on modern Europe.

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Nikos Kazantzakis's travel writing spans his entire life and accounts for some of his earliest writing and his last published work before his death. Along with the work of Kostas Ouranis, it has established him as one of the earliest exponents of a literary vein of this genre in Greece that coincided with a prolific period of his travel writing in the 1920s, and, in particular, in his volume Journeying (1927). His preoccupation with larger issues set beyond Greek borders, especially global ideological struggles, has bolstered the author's cosmopolitan credentials in Greek letters. However, events in Greece do, in fact, condition Kazantzakis's perspectives on social, political, economic, and cultural issues abroad. An analysis of the synergies of home (oikos) abroad demonstrates how the cosmopolitan genre of travel writing, for all its attempts to locate collectivities beyond nation borders, often restates the fixities of the self and/in the nation. I also trace the recurring typologies behind Kazantzakis's concerns as well as the religious fixations that underpin and mark them.