modern Greek literature

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Modernism. In Britain Modernism may be seen as a literary movement spanning the period from 1890 to the start of the Second World War. It may also be viewed as a collective term for the remarkable variety of contending groups, movements, and schools in literature, art, and music throughout Europe over the same period. The period was a time of confrontation with the public, typified by the issuing of manifestos, the proliferation of ‘little magazines’, and the rapid dissemination of avant-garde works and ideas across national borders or linguistic barriers.

The Modernist novel is often non-chronological, with experiments in the representation of time such as sudden jumps, temporal juxtapositions, or ‘spatialization of time’, in Joseph Frank's phrase (in which many different moments of time are presented with an effect of simultaneity), or studies of duration (making a great deal occur within a small amount of text, or stretching a small amount of action over a large textual space). Instead of upholding the realist illusion, the Modernists break narrative frames or move from one level of narration to another without warning; the works may be reflexive, about their own writing, or they may place one story inside another. Instead of plot events, there is an emphasis on characters' consciousness, unconsciousness, memory, and perception (after 1900, the ideas of Bergson and S. Freud became important tools and points of departure for writers and artists). Works are often oriented around a centre or centres of consciousness, and characterized by the use of such techniques as free indirect style and stream of consciousness. The narrators are often strangely limited third-person or unreliable first-person narrators, or there are multiple, shifting narrators. Instead of using closure and the fulfilment of reader expectations, or following genre conventions and formulas, Modernists often work towards open endings or unique forms, and value ambiguity and complexity. Modernist poetry follows similar lines, overthrowing the rhyme and traditional forms and moving towards fragmentation, juxtaposition of images from widely scattered times and cultures, complex intertextual allusion and patterning, and personal discourse, often purposefully obscure.

Each national experience of Modernism is unique. For English literature, the beginning of Modernism is associated with French-influenced fin-de-siècle movements such as naturalism, Symbolism, Decadence, and Aestheticism. Together with the aesthetic theories of Pater, the work of Baudelaire, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Corbière, and Valéry had a profound influence on the British Decadent poets of the 1890s, Wilde, Dowson, Arthur Symons, L. Johnson, and W. B. Yeats. Flaubert, Huysmans, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky were important influences for such fiction writers as J. Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, V. Woolf, and F. M. Ford.

Realistic fiction writers from the late 1890s to the Edwardian period wrote about modern life and often portrayed subjects such as extreme poverty, sexual misadventure, or the remote reaches of the British Empire, but they were following the general lines of the Victorian novel and were neither innovative in technique nor experimental in language. But in the late 1890s the novels of H. James signalled a new direction, becoming increasingly complex, dense, and ambiguous. In his ‘late style’, as it appears in The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, with his convoluted, overly qualified sentences filled with parenthetical statements, self-interruptions, and indirection, James achieves such nuance and subtlety that his writing takes on an overheated opacity, both gripping and enervating. James was a model for Crane, Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, and certainly had an impact on Virginia Woolf. Of the writers who began their careers in the 1890s, Conrad appears now to be the most fully Modernist, constantly experimenting with abrupt temporal and spatial shifts in the presentation of narrative information, with many long gaps in exposition or seeming digression. His novels employ a dense, nervous, and shifting prose style characterized by overdetermination, ambiguity, and repetition and by the use of multiple narrators and narrative frames; at the same time, they are engaged with important areas of fin-de-siècle anxiety: the corruption of imperialism and colonialism, urban chaos, political extremism, racism, the apparatus of secret police and surveillance, and the inability to discover the truth of events.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce started to experiment with interior monologue and free-indirect discourse (in which the style shifts to match the ‘centre of consciousness’ on that page, changing in complexity and reference as the character develops). Ulysses focuses on one day in the lives of two Dubliners, using a mixture of multiple narrators (including many different third-person narrative voices), interior monologue, stream of consciousness, literary parodies, constant stylistic and technical changes. Finnegans Wake takes experimentation to the extreme, providing a one-night study of a Dublin pub-owner and his family told in a multilingual, multiple-punning, endlessly intertextual dream-speech.

Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, though very different in the milieux they depict, were psychological novelists much influenced by Freud. Woolf is experimental in technique and narrative structure, and focused in subject matter, in such novels as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts. Lawrence is traditional in narrative form but poetic and emotional in his style and daring in his subject matter, especially concerning sexual relations, in works like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.

The soldier-poets ( W. Owen Rosenberg, Sassoon, Gurney) who wrote at the front line about the horrors of war were far more striking than their immediate predecessors, their work becoming increasingly horrific and disillusioned as the war went on. David Jones, in his long memoir-poems In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), was the most experimental of these writers. But it was three outsiders to England who are the most important figures in Modernist poetry: the Irish W. B. Yeats and the Americans Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Yeats drew from mystical or occult traditions, Irish history and mythology, Japanese Noh theatre, and his own life and passions. Pound declared the start of Imagism with his own famous two-line poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and the publication of a group of poems by H. D. ( H. Doolittle) and R. Aldington. Pound's own poetry shifted from imitation of Browning and medieval forms, through imitation of Japanese poetic structures and the minimalist writing of Imagism to Vorticism and, with the Cantos, the epic poem. This extremely complex ‘poem with history’ is almost 800 pages long, has many sections of Confucianism, 18th-cent. American history, Renaissance Italian portions, and elliptical personal memoirs. Making no concessions to the reader, it includes untranslated Chinese, Italian, Greek, Latin, French, and Provençal. T. S. Eliot arrived in London in 1914 and published Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. Eliot's poetry was marked by its juxtaposition of fragments, its humorous mixture of forms and linguistic registers, its intertextuality, and its use of personas and bleak, urban settings. His masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922), utilized all of these features and, in both its sweep through time and space and its indirection and ambiguity, captured the largest audience of any 20th-cent. English-language poem.

The writers of the 1930s set themselves apart from the earlier Modernists by their involvement with political, especially left-wing, causes, in response to the threats of Fascism and Nazism and the experience of the Spanish Civil War. Auden, Day-Lewis, Isherwood, Spender, and MacNeice are among the most important of these. Novelists Lowry and F. O'Brien, and the young Beckett continued the experiments of Joyce.

modern Greek literature literature written in Greek in the modern era, primarily beginning during the period of rebellion against the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

The Rebirth of Greek Literature

Under Turkish rule, Greek literature virtually ceased, except in Crete. In the late 18th cent. two patriots, the poet Rhigas Pheraios (1751–98) and the intellectual Adamantios Koraës (1748–1833), sought to encourage a revival of Greek letters. The revolutionary society Philike Hetairea, founded in 1816, reflected the growing influence in Greece of the French Enlightenment and the rise of European romanticism; both furnished the intellectual framework for the War of Independence (1821–27) and spurred the postwar nationalist revival that awakened a modern Greek literature.

The Language Debate

Literature was hampered, however, by conflict between supporters of the demotic, or popular, literary style, and adherents of a reformed classical style. The Greeks had been completely cut off from the classical tradition by centuries of Turkish occupation and the successful revolution had created such pride in the new nation that there were many champions of a demotic style. Others hoped to restore the classical language which, until the 15th cent., had had an unbroken tradition. Throughout the rest of the 19th cent. and also in the 20th cent., the reformed classical and demotic styles were upheld by uncompromising adherents.

Displaying the impact of Byron's romanticism, the poetry of Alexandros Rangabe (1810–92) offered the finest example of the classical style. Demetrios Vernadakis (1834–1907) and Spyridon Vasiliadis (1845–74) were 19th-century dramatists who wrote romantic plays in classical speech forms. While only recognized as the official language in 1976, demotic Greek won increasing acceptance in all literary genres, particularly in poetry, which flourished above all other forms in modern Greek literature.

The Ionian poets of the middle and late 19th cent. freely used the vernacular. Their leader was Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), a poet strongly under the influence of German idealism, whose "Ode to Liberty" became the national anthem. Others were Andreas Kalvos (1796–1869), Andreas Lascaratos (1811–1901), the poet Aristotle Valaoritis (1824–79), and the critic Jacob Polylas (1824–96). The Greek-French Jean Psichari (1854–1929) aroused a storm with his satire of the purists, The Voyage (1888), and the publication in 1901 of a demotic translation of the New Testament caused a riot in Athens among university students.

The demotic had the staunch support of such outstanding poets as Kostes Palamas ; the classicist Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933); the popular George Drossinis (1859–1951); and the collector of folk poetry, Apostolos Melachrinos. The short stories of Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851–1911) and Argyris Eftaliotis (1849–1923) expressed indigenous themes in the vernacular. Demotic dramatists include the naturalists Ioannis Kambisis (1872–1902) and the psychological dramatist Gregorios Xenopoulos (1867–1951), also an outstanding novelist. In 1927 the poet Angelos Sikelianos and his wife furthered the demotic cause with presentations at Delphi of classic Greek drama in the vernacular.

The Twentieth Century

In general, 20th-century Greek literature reflects the evolution of European modernism in such various forms as French symbolism and surrealism or British-American experiments in narrative technique. Symbolism appears in the work of George Seferis and George Kostiras, surrealism in that of Odysseus Elytis . Recognized as masters of modern Greek letters, Seferis and Elytis each received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1963 and 1979, respectively. The poet Maria Polydouri (1902–30) gained renown through her intense, erotic love lyrics. The effort of modern Greek writers to achieve a synthesis of the rich traditions of the Greek heritage is well represented in the work of Nikos Kazantzakis .

Novelists such as Stratis Tsirkas (1911–81), Costas Taktsis (1927–), and Vassilis Vassilikos (1934–) have combined formal innovation with a close analysis of postwar Greek society. Meanwhile, a group of women lyric poets have gained distinction, including Victoria Theodorou (1928–), Angeliki Paulopoulou (1930–), Eleni Fourtouni (1933–), and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1934–). In 1967 the government of King Constantine II was overthrown in a bloodless coup by a group of army colonels; despite strict censorship, antigovernment works still found their way into print. With the fall of the military government in 1974, civil liberties were restored and censorship ceased.

Bibliography

See W. Barnstone, ed., Eighteen Texts: Writings by Contemporary Greek Authors (1972); E. Keeley and P. Bien, ed., Modern Greek Writers (1972); C. A. Trypanis, Greek Poetry from Homer to Sefaris (1981).