Beskrivelse
In recent years, a certain strand of scholarship on the Greek experience under Ottoman rule has developed a new and rich historiographic tradition that reassesses the traditional national narrative about the Ottoman period as 400 years of darkness and slavery. The same tendency of revising the national narrative has been visible in the realm of fiction where an increasing number of historical novels with an Ottoman setting attempt to nuance the traditional picture of a homogeneous Greek Christian community with clear boundaries between the national self and other. A number of recent Greek novels in the realist popular genre tell stories about cultural and religious co-existence and blurred cultural identities. The question is how such new narratives are told and what kind of interpretations of the ‘new’ national self-understanding they provide. Against the background of recent scholarship on the notion of nostalgia in literature and popular culture this paper discusses how two recent historical novels in different ways make use of nostalgia as a literary effect. Nostalgic representations of the past say more about the present and longings for a better future than about the past. The paper, therefore, examines how the ideals of religious co-existence and syncretism displayed in the novels can be seen as comments on today’s challenges in Greece regarding cultural and religious diversity and the growing intolerance towards non-Orthodox immigrants.Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University
| Periode | 13 feb. 2015 |
|---|---|
| Sted for afholdelse | Unknown external organisation |