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Portrait of a Greek Imagination

An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis

Michael Herzfeld author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:16th Jan '98

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

Portrait of a Greek Imagination cover

Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld first met Greek novelist Andreas Nenedakis in the drafty courtyard of a public library. This encounter led to an enduring intellectual relationship that prompted Herzfeld to reconsider both the contours of fiction and the nature of anthropology. Portrait of a Greek Imagination, part biography and part ethnography, is Herzfeld's contextualization of Nenedakis's life, as it was both lived and fictionalized.

Herzfeld explores how personal vision intersects with national cultures by examining the Greek author's novels and recollections as historical accounts. Bringing together the methods of the novelist and the anthropologist in their common concern with both social and lived experience, Herzfeld shows how different perspectives shape the historical record. Nenedakis has endured persecution, exile, imprisonment, and torture under Greece's military dictatorship, and his novels—excerpted here in English for the first time—offer an individual version of historical events. As one of his characters ask, "For was not his life, and are not the lives of all of us, a novel?"

ISBN: 9780226329109

Dimensions: 23mm x 15mm x 2mm

Weight: 482g

342 pages