1st Edition

Contemporary Greek Fiction in a United Europe From Local History to the Global Individual

By Peter Mackridge Copyright 2004

    After more than twenty years as a full member of the European Union, Greece has produced a literature with radically different thematic, ideological and linguistic orientations from previous periods, for both domestic and international reasons. Since literature is considered to constitute both the repository of culture and one of its several manifestations, any attempt to assess cultural convergence in a unified Europe necessitates an examination and evaluation of contemporary literary production in individual member states. The present volume - the collective work of academics, literary critics and fiction writers - investigates the dramatically new trends that have emerged in contemporary Greek fiction and places this local literature within an international context.

    Introduction Greek Fiction in the Age of Globalization; 1: An Overview of Tendencies and Perspectives; 1: Centrifugal Topographies, Cultural Allegories and Metafictional Strategies in Greek Fiction since 1974; 2: Shifting Spaces, Drifting Identities; 2: The Greeks in the Balkans, the Balkans in Greece: Greek Fiction’s First Steps towards Acknowledging the Other Next Door; 3: The Alpha Males and Worker Bees of the Balkan Honeycomb: Economic Migrants in Contemporary Greek Fiction; 4: The Dislocated Self in a Global Situation; 5: Geographical and Ideological Wanderings: Greek Fiction of the 1990s; 3: The Global as Local; 6: From the Underworld to Other Worlds: Political Attitudes in Contemporary Greek Fiction; 7: ‘The Ultimate Art of our Greek Corruption’: 1 The Global as an Experimental Expansion of the Local in Yorgis Yatromanolakis’s Fiction; 4: Fragmented Worlds; 8: In and Out of the Text: Games across Genres in Modern Greek Fiction; 9: The Individual within Multiple Worlds in Greek Short Stories since 1974; 10: Ideology’s Discontents in Thanassis Valtinos’s Data from the Decade of the Sixties; 5: New Treatments of Old Themes; 11: The Portrait of the Artist in the Late Twentieth Century; 12: Angels in the Storm: The Portrait of the Woman Writer in Three Contemporary Novels by Women; 13: The Disunification of the Nation: Contemporary Greek Historical Fiction and Collective Identities

    Biography

    Peter Mackridge