Two members of the REVICTO team, Efterpi Mitsi and Anna Despotopoulou, organized a panel on ‘Victorians and Intertemporal Greece’ in the conference ‘The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal’ which took place in the University of Durham (10-12/7/2024). This was the inaugural conference of The International Nineteenth Century Studies Association (INCSA).
The panel explored the fascinating affiliations between the literary cultures of Britain and Greece during the Victorian period. After the War of Independence, Greece struggled for self-definition among conflicting geopolitical interests, with different imperial powers, including Britain, vying to control and “protect” its institutions. Greece was a site of unevenness for the Victorians, oscillating between the ancient and the modern, the West and the East. The British were divided between, on the one hand, restoring an idea of classical Greece as a modern epic and, on the other hand, taking a critical and even mocking distance from the hybridity embodied by Modern Greece. Victorian periodicals, fiction, and travelogues are a rich resource that reveals the construction of a multifaceted and contradictory image of Greece, one that produced both static and dynamic ideas about Modern Greek identity. This panel intervened in current scholarly debates about these issues. It examined what the Victorian interest in Greece meant for the literary and historical networks of culture it encompassed. Was it a means of appropriation? A transnational network of affiliation? A challenge to the insularity of Victorian literary production and reception? What global crisscrossing cultural currents were given priority, and to what end? To answer these questions, the three 20-minute papers gauged the tensions – between past and present, and hybridities between “primitive” and modern, “oriental” and European – that emerge from genres including poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, short stories, and essays. By positioning the Victorians in relation to Greece’s longer history, this panel examined in particular the reciprocity, mutuality and patterns of exchange in both nations’ modern self-fashioning. The panel sought to explore how Britain’s preoccupation with Modern Greece was a means by which national identity and culture, both British and Greek, were fundamentally reconceptualized through their encounter with one another.
The three speakers of the panel were Michèle Mendelssohn, who talked on ‘Interpolating Time: Oscar Wilde Goes to Greece’, Efterpi Mitsi on ‘Fashioning Greece in The Woman’s World’ and Anna Despotopoulou on ‘Gods or Brigands: The myths of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Fiction.
You may read the conference’s full programme here and find the full abstracts here at the official conference website.
