Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913-2013

Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination, 1913–2013 offers a comprehensive overview of British female writing on Greece in the twentieth century and beyond. Contributors cover a vast array of authors: Rose Macaulay, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Ann Quin, Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Mary Stewart, Victoria Hislop, Loretta Proctor and Sofka Zinovieff formed special ties with Greece and made it the focus of their literary imagination. Moving from Bloomsbury to Mills & Boon, the book offers insight into the ways romantic literature has shaped readers’ perceptions about Greece. Why have female authors of such diverse backgrounds and literary orientations been attracted by a country burdened by its past and troubled by its present? What aspects of the country do they choose to highlight? Are female perceptions of Greece different from male ones? The book examines these and many more exciting questions. Given its focus and diversity, it is addressed to audiences in English and Greek studies, Classical reception, European modernism, cultural studies and popular fiction, as well as to non-academic English-speaking readers who have an interest in Greece.

Eleni Papargyriou teaches at the University of Vienna, having previously lectured at King’s College London (2009–13). She has held research and teaching positions at Oxford, Princeton and the University of Ioannina, Greece. She has published the monograph Reading Games in the Greek Novel (2011) and co-edited Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives Materialities (2015). She has published articles on intertextuality and the novel, the cultural implications of (self)translation, visual modernity and the rapport between literary text and photographic image. She is on the editorial board for the Journal of Greek Media and Culture.

Semele Assinder studied Classics at Oxford before going to Cambridge to work on her doctoral dissertation, Greece in British Women’s Writing, 1866–1915. During her PhD, she worked in Athens while holding an Onassis Foreigner’s Fellowship; upon completion she took up the British School at Athens’ Macmillan Rodewald Studentship.

David Holton is Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Selwyn College. He is the author of many books and articles on Modern Greek language and literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. He edited Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete (1991) and co-edited Copyists, Collectors, Redactors and Editors: Manuscripts and Editors of Late Byzantine and Early Modern Greek Literature (2005). He has also edited twenty volumes of the journal Kambos: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek (1993–2013). He was Chairman of the Society for Modern Greek Studies (2012–2016).