Chair: Maria Margaronis (journalist and critic)
11:00-11:20am: Michalis Sotiropoulos, ‘The Greek Revolution of 1821 and the Many Faces of British Philhellenism’
Historians have long discussed the British responses to the Greek Revolution, as well as the contribution of the British Philhellenes to the successful outcome of the Greek Revolution. This paper will reassess British Philhellenism by drawing on the research project Unpublished Archives of British Philhellenism during the Greek Revolution of 1821, currently undertaken by the British School at Athens in collaboration with the National Library of Greece and generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Its aim is to complicate our understanding of the phenomenon, by revisiting some age-old questions such as: What motivated the British Philhellenes to mobilize in favour of the Greeks? What different political visions and ideas did they articulate? How do these visions relate to the wider 19th-century context of colonialism and empire?
Speaker Bio
Michalis Sotiropoulos is the 1821 Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the British School at Athens, and the principal investigator of the BSA research project Unpublished Archives of British Philhellenism during the Greek Revolution of 1821. He has held postdoctoral and teaching positions at Queen Mary, University of London, Princeton University, the University of Athens, and the Democritus University of Thrace. His research interests lie in the intellectual history of the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the Mediterranean and the processes (revolts, revolutions, secessions, unifications, constitution-making and state-building) that changed the political culture and eventually the geopolitical map of the region. He has published widely on these issues. His book, Liberalism after the Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek state, c. 1830-1880, was recently published by Cambridge University Press.
11:20-11:40am: Georgia Farinou-Malamatari, ‘Philhellenism and After: Greece in E.F. Benson’s Life and Work’
The paper will examine the relations of the prolific writer E. F. Benson (1867-1940) with Greece during his stay in the country in the 1890s as an archaeologist, honorary secretary of a refugee committee, newspaper correspondent, and novelist (who wrote two ‘historical’ novels on the Greek War of Independence). It focuses on the motives and reception (in England and Greece) of Benson’s literary output related to Greece and on the country’s representation in his subsequent (auto)biographical reminiscences, which stem from evolving political and historical contexts.
Speaker Bio
Georgia Farinou-Malamatari is Professor Emerita of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She studied Classics, Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature at the University of Athens and received her PhD at King’s College London, where she holds a visiting appointment. Her research interests are in 19th and 20th-century Greek prose in a theoretical (narratology, reception theory and Bakhtin) and comparative framework. She has published several studies in periodicals and dedicatory volumes and she published or edited books on Xenopoulos, Psycharis, Beratis, Vassilikos and mainly Alexandros Papadiamantis.
11:40am-12:00 noon: Maria Nikolopoulou, ‘Translating Modern Greek Fiction and the Koraes Chair: The English translation of Life in the Tomb by Stratis Myrivilis in the Interwar Period’
The presentation will focus on the attempt to publish Stratis Myrivilis’ Life in the Tomb in English, undertaken in the early 1930s. This effort is connected to the wave of war books published in the 1920s and the success of All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929. After the 1930 edition of Myrivilis’ book, Penelope Delta acted as a mediator and motivated Alexandros Pallis, who was a translator himself, a prominent member of the Greek community in Britain and a member of the Subscribers’ Committee of the Koraes Chair at King’s College London, to fund and assist the translation. Eleftherios Venizelos also mediated with a personal letter to Pallis. The book was deemed better than that of Erich Maria Remarque, although Delta had mentioned that the criticism against the army and the church and the references to the soldiers’ repressed sexuality should be toned down. The translator was F. H. Marshall, Koraes Professor, who also took on the duty to contact publishing houses. The translation was a shortened version of the original. The manuscript does not exist in the archives, apart from a chapter titled ‘The Deserters’.
Nevertheless, due to the Depression in 1932, Pallis was unable to fund the translation and publication of the book. Myrivilis paid Marshall himself. The attempts by Pallis and Marshall to find a publisher failed, because the Depression had also affected book sales and ‘the interest in war books has materially diminished’, as mentioned by a representative of Putnam Publishers. During the same period, attempts were made to translate and publish the book in the USA by Greek Americans, which also failed for similar reasons.
The aborted attempt of the publication and the existing correspondence with the publishing houses is a case study for reception of foreign literature in Britain, for translation as cultural adaptation, for the role of Classics and Modern Greek scholars and the Greek communities as cultural mediators, for the attempt to promote Modern Greek literature through international political and cultural trends and the role of literature in cultural diplomacy.
Speaker Bio
Maria Nikolopoulou belongs to the Laboratory and Teaching Staff of the Department of Philology at the National and Κapodistrian University of Athens. She studied Classics at the same university and subsequently obtained an MA and a PhD degree in Modern Greek Literature from the Department of Modern Greek Studies at King’s. She was a Regional Associate Fellow of the Nexus Project ‘How to Think about the Balkans’, run by the Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia (2002), and a Fellow in the research project ‘Women’s Literary and Artistic Activity in Greek Literary and Art Periodicals: 1900-1940’, run by the Athens School of Fine Arts (2005-7). She was a Fellow in Comparative Cultural Studies of Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece (2020-2021). She has taught European and Modern Greek Literature at the University of Patras and at the Greek Open University as an associate lecturer. Her research interests include the reception of women’s writing, the role of literature in the construction of memory of historical events, the role of periodicals in the history of ideas and the post-war avant-garde.
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