The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896)

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Routledge, 2016 M03 3 - 284 pages
Every Greek and every friend of the country knows the date 1821, when the banner of revolution was raised against the empire of the Ottoman Turks, and the story of 'Modern Greece' is usually said to begin. Less well known, but of even greater importance, was the international recognition given to Greece as an independent state with full sovereign rights, as early as 1830. This places Greece in the vanguard among the new nation-states of Europe whose emergence would gather momentum through to the early twentieth century, a process whose repercussions continue to this day. Starting out from that perspective, which has been all but ignored until now, this book brings together the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the contribution of characteristically nineteenth-century European modes of thought to the 'making' of Greece as a modern nation. Closely linked to nationalism is romanticism, which exercised a formative role through imaginative literature, as is demonstrated in several chapters on poetry and fiction. Under the broad heading 'uses of the past', other chapters consider ways in which the legacies, first of ancient Greece, then later of Byzantium, came to be mobilized in the construction of a durable national identity at once 'Greek' and 'modern'. The Making of Modern Greece aims to situate the Greek experience, as never before, within the broad context of current theoretical and historical thinking about nations and nationalism in the modern world. The book spans the period from 1797, when Rigas Velestinlis published a constitution for an imaginary 'Hellenic Republic', at the cost of his life, to the establishment of the modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, an occasion which sealed with international approval the hard-won self-image of 'Modern Greece' as it had become established over the previous century.

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Contents

Editors preface
1993
the view from the early twentyfirst century
the German
European historiographical influences upon the young Konstantinos
Philhellenism and Hellenism
sacred myths motifs and symbols in
Revisiting religion and nationalism in nineteenthcentury Greece
the emergence of a national ideal in the narratives
competing Greek perspectives on
Radical nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands 1815
Modern Greek and some parallel
canonizing Dionysios Solomos as
poetry and prose fiction in the national
Alexis Politis
Afterword
Copyright

the Romantic redefinition of

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About the author (2016)

Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, and David Ricks is Senior Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies, both in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King's College London, UK.

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