Placing Modern Greece

Abstract

This book offers a fresh look at one of the most tenacious features of Romantic Hellenism: its fascination with modern Greece as material and ideal alike. It suggests that literary representations of modern Greece, by both foreign and Greek writers, run on notions of a significant landscape. Landscape, as a critical term, is itself the product of the period when Greece assumed increasing importance as a territorial, political and modern entity. The implied authority of nature, in turn, follows its own dynamic and highly ambivalent logic of representation. Greece operated as a material symbol, one that shared the brittle structure of the Romantic image. To explicate this enabling structure this study draws on the critical writings of Herder, Schiller and the early Romantics, while grounding mainly German philhellenic writing in its cultural and political context. Main authors discussed are Friedrich Hölderlin and Wilhelm Müller, but also the first generation of Greek writers in the new nation state after 1821: Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, Panagiotis Soutsos, Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos. To enlist authors challenged to write from within the place of Greece allows not only a new take on the problematic imagery of Greece, but also gives a new dimension to the study of Hellenism as a trans-national movement.

Cosmopolitanism: The Mediterranean Archives

“…The relationship between colonized and colonizers, between subaltern and hegemonic cultures, is nevertheless much more complex than it might appear from a classic postcolonial standpoint (Giaccaria and Minca 2011). European colonialism in the Mediterranean cannot be imagined without making reference to the search for modern Europe's roots in ancient Greece and to the fact that this quest actually took place as both a cause and a consequence of modernity/colonialism (Saïd 2005;Guthenke 2008). The production of the European South envisaged by Mignolo was always trapped between the establishment of a civilized distance between Northern Europeans and "corrupted" Mediterraneans (Horden and Purcell 2000) and the recognition of a cultural continuity between European modernity/coloniality and its Mediterranean past.…”

The Peculiarities of German Philhellenism

“…Although parallels between the multiplicity of Greek city-states and the German plethora of principalities had long been bruited, this particular form and style of appropriation was something new. 17 In a simultaneous emulation and rejection of the French paradigm, which had demonstrated how effectively a modern political and artistic identity could be forged through identification with ancient imperial Rome, German national pride demanded the annexation of an even more august and Page 6 of 31…”

“…Hence, all the authors in question are more or less invested in the view that 'representations of contemporary Greece, and critical approaches to it, have owed (and still owe) much to the structural position that suspends Greece between its own antiquity and any given observer's modernity. '55 Constanze Güthenke, in Placing modern Greece: the dynamics of romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840 (2008) investigates depictions of the Greek landscape in both German and Greek Romantic poetry (written before, during, and after the Greek War of Independence), exploring the ways in which literary representations of modern Greece consistently tend to express the tension between modern reality and antique ideal, even when composed by authors who had never visited the Greek mainland. Meanwhile, Christopher Meid's Griechenland-Imaginationen.…”

Cosmopolitanism: the Mediterranean Archives†

“…European colonialism in the Mediterranean cannot be imagined without making reference to the search for modern Europe's roots in ancient Greece and to the fact that this quest actually took place as both a cause and a consequence of modernity/colonialism (Saïd 2005;Guthenke 2008). The production of the European South envisaged by Mignolo was always trapped between the establishment of a civilized distance between Northern Europeans and "corrupted" Mediterraneans (Horden and Purcell 2000) and the recognition of a cultural continuity between European modernity/coloniality and its Mediterranean past.…”