Constanze Guthenke, Placing Modern Greece. The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840
Oxford University Press, Classical Presences, 288 p.
EAN : 9780199231850
Présentation de l'éditeur
Placing Modern Greece is about literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke claims that the imagining of and attitude towards Greece was shaped by a fascination with the material, and by the highly conceptualized tension between the ideal on the one hand, and the material on the other. Her study focuses on nature and landscape imagery as vehicles of representation, on their specific inner workings, and on their dynamic, which conditions how and whether Greece as a modern entity in the making can be represented at all. Offering readings from German and contemporaneous Greek authors, Guthenke supplies a commentary on the translation and crossings of representational models and their limits.
Readership: Scholars and students of classics, classical reception, philhellenism, cultural history, Romantic literature (especially English and German).
Contents
Introduction: Realizing the Ideal
1. The Form of Greek Landscape
2. `I love it all around, this land of Greece. It has the colour of my heart': The Greek Landscape of the German Soul before 1821
3. Nature in Arms: German Philhellenism, its Literature, and the Greek War of Independence
4. The Ambivalence of Nature: Poetry for the Greek State
5. Between Idyll and Abyss: The Greek Land, As Seen from the Ionian Islands
Epilogue
L'auteur
Constanze Guthenke, Assistant Professor of Classics and Hellenic Studies, Princeton University