Greece in Victorian Popular Culture
International Conference
8-9 April 2022
Department of English Language and Literature
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation
Call for Papers
Nineteenth-century Greece figured vividly in many Victorian popular novels, short fiction, travelogues, essays, poems, articles of public opinion, and even in advertisements which appeared in magazines, newspapers, and other publications. The diverse body of Victorian popular literature on Greece manifests the modern country’s focal position in the Victorian imagination. As a site of affiliations between the classical and the modern, the West and the East, Greece remained a constitutive part of the West and its imaginary tropes, civilization, the nation-state, and democracy. At the same time the new nation confused and often disappointed Victorians who were divided between restoring an idea of classical Greece as a modern epic and taking a critical and even mocking distance from the hybridity that Modern Greece represented.
This conference aims to explore the cultural relations and tensions that develop from the multifaceted representations of Greece in Victorian popular culture.
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- the debates and controversies surrounding the representation of Greece’s emergent identity as an independent nation in Victorian popular literature and culture
- imperial politics and the representation of Modern Greece
- the interface between the popular and the academic readings of Modern Greece
- gendered, racial, and class interpretations of Greece
- the tension between classical and Modern Greece as it emerges in Victorian Hellenism
- nostalgic Philhellenism in Victorian popular literature and culture
- word and image: the way in which the interaction between images and text conveys meaning (social and cultural commentary, political satire, or propaganda); illustrated magazines
- travel writing, guidebooks, and postcards
- literary or artistic constructions of life in nineteenth-century Greece and popular adaptations of ancient Greek topics, characters, or themes
- Greek material culture in British exhibitions, collections, and museums
- Greece in Victorian material culture and the rise of consumerism
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Tatiana Kontou, Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes University
Churnjeet Mahn, Reader, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Please submit abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers and short biographical notes (80-100 words) no later than 30 September 2021 to revictoproject@gmail.com. Confirmation of acceptance: 20 October 2021.
DEADLINE extended to Oct. 31, 2021.
Confirmation of acceptance: 15 November 2021.
Selected conference papers will be subsequently published in an edited collection.
This conference is funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (HFRI), under the “First Call for HFRI Research Projects to support Faculty members and researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant.” Title of Research Project: “Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture (REVICTO)”. Project website: https://revictoproject.com/
Please note that we plan to hold an in-person conference at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, yet we are also following the covid-19 developments around the world and will make arrangements for a hybrid/virtual conference should it be necessary.
Advisory Committee:
Efterpi Mitsi, Professor, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Anna Despotopoulou, Professor, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Tatiana Kontou, Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes University
Organizing Committee:
Konstantina Georganta, Postdoctoral Researcher, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Chryssa Marinou, Postdoctoral Researcher, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Mathilde Pyrli, Doctoral Candidate, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens