Chair: Eleni Yannakakis (novelist)
Questions for all four speakers follow at the end of the session
9:40-10:00am: David Ricks, ‘Haunted by Missolonghi: Two Poets Rewrite Their Homeland’
Missolonghi is for Greeks sacred ground, and for Greek poets ground guarded always by the shade of Solomos and The Free Besieged, not to mention a host of lesser poems—and haunted, too, of course, by the figure of Byron. How much more so for those poets who have grown up in this small provincial town with its imposing role in Greek national sentiment. This paper explores how two near-contemporaries from Missolonghi sought in their maturity ways to recreate the place in poems which take a more oblique stance in relation to history and to the poet’s vocation. The paper will compare a collection by a poet taking time off from being national poet in a straightforward sense (Kostis Palamas [1859-1943), Οι καημοί της λιμνοθάλασσας [1912]) with a rather different collection inspired by Missolonghi, the work of an artful poet of minor ambitions (Miltiadis Malakasis (1869-1943), Τα Μεσολογγίτικα [1920]).
Speaker Bio
David Ricks is Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature, King’s College London, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham. He first came to King’s to write a doctoral thesis, on what would today be called classical reception, under the supervision of Roderick Beaton. The two later worked in harness from 1989 to 2018, supervising between them some forty doctoral students in the fields of modern Greek literature and culture. David Ricks is, with Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala), Editor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. Encouraged by the Beatonian breadth of outlook, he has published on many phases of poetry in Greek, from Digenes Akrites and Erotokritos in earlier periods to Nasos Vayenas and Michalis Ganas today.
10:00-10:20am: Maria Karaiskou, ‘Lord Byron’s Fictional Reflections in Modern Greek Prose Fiction’
The portrait of Lord Byron in the context of modern Greek poetry has attracted adequate critical attention, but the versions of Byron emerging from modern Greek prose fiction have largely remained unexplored. This paper attempts to illustrate this neglected area by focusing on two prose texts of the Greek nineteenth century, St. Xenos’ emblematic Ηρωίς της ελληνικής επαναστάσεως (1861) and K. Ramfos’ short story «Διήγημα» (1859), and, in addition, on two novels of the twenty-first century, I. Zourgos’ Αηδονόπιτα (2008) and K. Akrivos’ Πότε διάβολος πότε άγγελος (2021). The paper will explore the elements that constitute the fictional myth of Byron in relation to its respective constructions in modern Greek poetry, the arts (painting) as well as the historical discourse. At the same time the comparison and contrast between the two pairs of fictional narratives will highlight not only the intertextual dialogue between them but also how Byron’s image has been developed from the period of the first post-revolutionary decades to our modern era of reconsideration of the historical past (and revision of the myths it passed on to us).
Speaker Bio
Maria Karaiskou is an assistant professor of Modern Greek Literature in the Department of Preschool Education at the University of Crete. She studied modern Greek literature in the Department of Philology at the same university and continued her studies in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at King’s College London, where she first obtained an MA (1996) and then a PhD degree (2002). Her PhD on the formation of the modern Greek short story between 1880–1920 was supervised by Professor Roderick Beaton. Her research interests revolve around modern Greek prose fiction, poetry and criticism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, genre theory, comparative literature, and children’s literature.
10:20-10:40am: Nicoletta Hadjipavlou, ‘Representations of the 9th of July 1821 Events in Cyprus in the Work of Four Seminal Cypriot Poets’
When the Greek War of Independence broke out on March 25, 1821, in Greece, a number of Cypriots secretly left the island, which was also under Ottoman rule, to fight in Greece. On the island, proclamations and leaflets in favour of the War of Independence were circulated to the people. The pasha on the island, Kuchuk Mehmet, reacted to the Cypriots’ support to the Greek war by confiscating weapons and secret leaflets and arresting many eminent Cypriots, among them Archbishop Kyprianos of Cyprus. On 9 July 1821, Archbishop Kyprianos, his bishops, and other leading figures were sentenced to death by hanging, and the execution took place shortly after.
This paper explores how four seminal Cypriot poets, Vassilis Michaelides (1849-1917), Demetris Lipertis (1866-1933), Kyriacos Charalambides (b.1940), and Niki Marangou (1948-2013), represent aspects of the July 9 events in their work. It aims to compare the appropriation of these events by those poets who experienced Ottoman rule on the island first-hand and were raised in the aftermath of the events with those who did not directly experience Ottoman rule, but view the events through the lens of other memorable events in the recent history of the island: their experience of British rule on the island (1878-1960) and the Turkish Invasion of 1974.
Speaker Bio
Nicoletta Hadjipavlou is an independent researcher of the modern Greek poetry and literature of Cyprus and of teaching Greek as a foreign language. She is currently teaching in secondary education in Cyprus and is also the Coordinator of Modern Greek at the American Academy Nicosia. She first started as an undergraduate student of Roderick Beaton in 2006 and wrote a thesis on Nikos Kavvadias under his supervision. She then pursued an MA and PhD in Modern Greek at King’s College London. Her PhD thesis, ‘“This too will pass”: Constructing the Idea of Empire in the Modern Greek Poetry of Cyprus (1878-2004)’, was supervised by Roderick Beaton (2015). As a PhD student she received the Leventis Foundation Educational Grant for three consecutive years and presented her work at numerous international conferences. During the academic year 2018-2019 she was a Casual Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and taught Cavafy and Seferis as part of the ‘Introduction to Modern Greek Literature and Culture’ module.
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