DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

In Byron's Shadow

Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination

David Roessel author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:14th Aug '03

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This paperback is available in another edition too:

In Byron's Shadow cover

Winner of the 2001 Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars^L Winner of the 2002 Elma Dangerfield Award from the International Byron Society

'In Byron's Shadow' examines the history of how and why English and American authors projected their own concerns and consciousness onto modern Greece, tracing how the conception of the country evolved from a politicised, feminised, Apollonian space during the Roman era to a carefree Dionysian lotus land in the last decade of Modernism.Modern Greece, constructed by the early nineteenth-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been "haunted, holy ground" in English and American literature for almost two centuries. In Byron's Shadow analyzes how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of "Greece" to suit changing eras.

... an eclectic blend of literary criticism, political history, and conceptual geography. * The Wordsworth Circle *
... ambitious and thought-provoking. * The Wordsworth Circle *
Along with offering useful readings of particular literary texts, Roessel provides a clear-eyed, un-pedantic guide to the tangled web of freedom-fighting and nation-building that actually occurred in a land that has proven enduringly fascinating to the Anglo-American imagination. The result: a rich, accessible, and edifying treatment of a subject well worth the scholarly digging and the intellectual voyage. * The Wordsworth Circle *
Based on dauntingly wide reading, David Roessel's study provides an astute, convincing and unsentimental survey of the ways in which anglophone writers' reactions to Greece have changed over the years ... All philhellenes will find In Byron's Shadow absorbing. * Times Literary Supplement *
This book is a sheer delight. It is rare to come across such a combination of readability, anecdotal pleasure, intelligence, research, ... erudition and passion. Roessel's book is no mere survey and synopsis of literature, though of course there is a great deal of this. He pursues a number of interesting theses with keen intelligence, and the pages are dotted with insights - too many to summarize. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *

  • Winner of Winner of the 2001 Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars Winner of the 2002 Elma Dangerfield Award from the International Byron Society.

ISBN: 9780195166620

Dimensions: 152mm x 231mm x 25mm

Weight: 513g

416 pages