On Wednesday, 13 May 2015, Alexander Grammatikos (PhD Candidate at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) will give a talk entitled:
“Early Nineteenth-Century British Travellers in Ottoman Greece”
The talk will take place in Room 308 (School of English Library, New Philosophy Building) at 7:15 pm.
Below you can find the speaker’s bio and paper abstract.
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“Early Nineteenth-Century British Travellers in Ottoman Greece”
Abstract
This talk focuses on early nineteenth-century British travellers’ conceptions of Modern Greeks during Greece’s final years under Ottoman authority. My presentation begins by examining Europe’s growing interest in Modern Greek affairs during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before shifting to early nineteenth-century British travel writers’ analyses of Modern Greek education and Romaic literature. I argue that such writers as John Cam Hobhouse, William Martin Leake, and Lord Byron use Modern Greek education and Romaic literature as a way to question Greece’s relationship with England and to depict the country as either discordant with Europe, or amenable to absorption into its sociopolitical structure. Finally, my talk examines Byron’s response (in the Notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) to an 1810 Edinburgh Review article that begins as an even-handed analysis of Modern Greek literature but ends up disparaging Modern Greek writers and making the common claim that Modern Greek is a degenerated form of Ancient Greek. Although Byron’s interest in Modern Greek literature and language remains a neglected aspect of the poet’s work, I argue that his championing of Modern Greek literature gestures toward his broader support for a stronger intercultural relationship between Greece and Britain. Further, I contend that Byron’s defense of Romaic Greek, which comes during a period when a Hellenic model of Greece is becoming increasingly popular throughout Europe, represents the poet’s attempt to move away from solely classical conceptions of Greece and to familiarize British readers with a contemporary culture with which they were very little acquainted.
Bio
Alexander Grammatikos is a fourth year PhD candidate at Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). His academic interests include British literary history, Modern Greek history, and European print culture. He has presented papers at the International Conference on Romanticism (Rochester, 2008), the International Student Byron Conference (Messolonghi, 2013) and the International Byron Conference (London, 2013). He has published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2014) and the Keats-Shelley Journal (2014), and has a forthcoming paper in the European Romantic Review (2016).
