Efterpi Mitsi

This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukács, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of “hotel modernisms” as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this complex problem play, surveying its key themes and evolving critical preoccupations. Considering its generic ambiguity and experimentalism, it also provides a uniquely detailed and up-to-date history of the play's stage performance from Dryden's rewriting up to Mark Ravenhill and Elizabeth LeCompte's controversial 2012 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Wooster Group.

Moving through to four new critical essays, the guide opens up fresh perspectives on the play's iconoclastic nature and its key themes, ranging from issues of gender and sexuality to Elizabethan politics, from the uses of antiquity to questions of cultural translation, with particular attention paid on Troilus' “Greekness”.

The volume finishes with a helpful guide to critical and web-based resources. Discussing the ways in which this challenging and acerbic play can be brought to life in the classroom, it suggests performance-based strategies, designed to engage with the dramaturgical and theatrical dimensions of the text; close-reading exercises with an emphasis on rhetoric, metaphor and the practice of “troping”; and a series of tools designed to situate the play in a range of contexts, including its classical and critical frameworks

This book examines the letters, diaries, and published accounts of English and Scottish travelers to Greece in the seventeenth century, a time of growing interest in ancient texts and the Ottoman Empire. Through these early encounters, this book analyzes the travelers’ construction of Greece in the early modern Mediterranean world and shows how travel became a means of collecting and disseminating knowledge about ancient sites. Focusing on the mobility and exchange of people, artifacts, texts, and opinions between the two countries, it argues that the presence of Britons in Greece and of Greeks in England aroused interest not only in Hellenic antiquity, but also in Greece’s contemporary geopolitical role. Exploring myth, perception, and trope with clarity and precision, this book offers new insight into the connections between Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and the West.

Women Writing Greece explores images of modern Greece by women who experienced the country as travellers, writers, and scholars, or who journeyed there through the imagination. The essays assembled here consider women's travel narratives, memoirs and novels, ranging from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing on the role of gender in travel and cross-cultural mediation and challenging stereotypical views of 'the Greek journey', traditionally seen as an antiquarian or Byronic pursuit. This collection aims to cast new light on women's participation in the discourses of Hellenism and Orientalism, examining their ideological rendering of Greece as at once a luminous land and a site crossed by contradictory cultural memories. Arranged chronologically, the essays discuss encounters with Greece by, among others, Lady Elizabeth Craven, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Montagu, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley, Felicia Skene, Emily Pfeiffer, Eva Palmer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, Christa Wolf, Patricia Storace and Gillian Bouras, and analyse them through a variety of critical, historical, contextual and theoretical frames.

When George Chapman dedicated his translation of Musaeus’ Hero and Leander to Inigo Jones, he praised the architect for his ‘ingenuous love to all works in which the ancient Greek souls have appeared to you’. Two decades earlier, in 1598, Chapman completed Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, adding his own adaptation of Musaeus to Marlowe’s translation. Chapman’s complex response not only to Marlowe’s poem but also to classical antiquity appears in the description of Hero’s scarf (sestiad 4.13–121), where Chapman, using the figure of a female artist, creates an intricate ekphrasis, modelled on Achilles’ shield, from a variety of Greek and Roman sources. As Hero weaves her elaborate scarf, Chapman alludes to the ekphrasis of Arachne’s tapestry in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6, while the embroidered scenes of the fisherman and the country maid and the foxes stem from Theocritus’ first Idyll. Hero’s needle is transformed into the translator’s pen initiating a collaboration between living and dead poets and linking Chapman to the ‘ancient Greek souls’. This paper seeks to unravel this thread of connections, reading the ekphrasis as a gendered trope for early modern creativity and as a reflection on the translation and appropriation of ancient sources.

Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, a play which probably dates from 1592 but has reached posterity in a mangled form, enacts the incorporation of religious and state politics in the theatre. Through a sequence of short scenes characterized by senseless brutality and black humor, Marlowe revisits one of the darkest episodes of French history, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which took place on the 24th and 25th August 1572. Dramatizing the slaughter of thousands of Protestants by Catholics, the play not only reflects on the significance of massacre as a political term for an increasingly absolutist Renaissance Europe but also translates the violence of massacre into aesthetic form. Itself alien within the body of Marlowe's dramatic works, The Massacre at Paris has rarely been performed after its Elizabethan successful performances at the Rose; this is not surprising given the state of the extant text and its dismissal by many critics as crude anti-Catholic...

The article explores the reception of ‘1821’ in Victorian popular culture, focusing on the representation of Greek women in stories published in contemporary periodicals. The two dominant tropes of Greek womanhood that emerge in popular fiction and poetry published from the 1830s to the 1890s ‐ the captive harem slave and the intrepid warrior ‐ arouse sympathy for the enslaved women but also evoke liberal ideas on women’s national and social roles. These texts foreground the position of Greek women within a nineteenth-century social context and imbue in them virtues and conflicts such as radicalism, the enfranchisement of women and middle-class domesticity that concerned Britain as much as Greece. Greek women, as represented in these stories, construct a Victorian narrative of ‘1821’ and of the Greek nation that oscillates between familiarity and strangeness, freedom and enslavement, real and imaginary. These largely neglected texts challenge traditional definitions of philhellenism...

William Lithgow’s travel account, published first in 1614, 1623, and in 1632 as The Totall Discourse, fashions the narrator as a Scottish Protestant pilgrim enmeshed in endless tragicomic travails while navigating the Aegean amid fears of captivity and loss. The amount of copying from other accounts casts doubt on the author’s claim that his book is composed only by his “own eyesight, and ocular experience” and exemplifies the genre of travel writing in this period, combining plagiarism, fantasy, and fact. Lithgow’s reflections on mutability and on the rise and fall of empires are examined in connection with Thomas Coryat’s description of Troy, which functions for both travelers as a symbolic place of memory.

While in early seventeenth-century England, writers like William Lithgow warned against Greeks traveling to England to escape Ottoman oppression, claiming that they were liars and thieves, the pamphlet of Christopher Angell, a Grecian who tasted of many stripes and torments inflicted by the Turkes for the faith which he had in Christ Jesus, published in Oxford (1617), makes a passionate appeal for England’s help to persecuted Greeks. The monk Christophoros Angelos found refuge at Oxford as tutor of Greek, after being tortured and imprisoned in Athens by the Ottoman rulers of the city. In this overlooked testimony, the author envisioned England as the liberating force against the Ottoman Empire, presenting through his own life story the relations between Britons and Greeks in the period.

George Gissing’s novella *Sleeping Fires* (1895) presents a late nineteenth-century Athens that is divided between its ancient and modern identities. As a reflection on the significance of Hellenism in Victorian culture, the novella narrates the random encounter between Edmund Langley, a self-exile with a classical education, and Louis Reed, a passionate and radical young man, who is revealed to be Langley’s lost and unknown son. In the context of Gissing’s diaries and letters recording his visit to Athens, *Sleeping Fires* portrays the city as an ambivalent space, both inspirational and deceptive. Gissing’s juxtaposition of the ancient monuments’ beauty with the bleakness of their modern surroundings emphasizes the distance between antiquity and modernity as well as Victorians’ misinterpretations of Greece, revealing the period’s conflicting discourses about Hellenism.

Athens emerges as a paradox in travel literature; it is both a site of timeless monuments and a city in constant metamorphosis. From the late seventeenth to the twenty-first century, a great number of travelogues have revealed the changing identity of Athens and the ways in which its images were circulated and interpreted through the centuries. Classical imagery became the symbol of Athens through its first detailed descriptions by early travelers, while eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, writers, and artists negotiated impulses to idealize, admire, or even satirize the city Athens in their secular pilgrimages. When Athens became the capital of the new nation after the GreekWar of Independence, its symbolic significance increased, suggesting not only the continuity with antiquity but also the divided position of Greece between past and present, East and West, the ideal and the real. Following its transformation into a modern metropolis, Athens continues to challenge travel writers to capture its ambiguity and explore its mythologies and traumas.

The Comedy of Errors begins with the description of a shipwreck, presenting the significance of the sea and sea travel as forces both separating and reuniting characters and families. By situating his play in the port city of Ephesus, Shakespeare not only changes the setting of his main source (Plautus’s Menaechmi) from the Adriatic to the Aegean, but also opens up a magical “fairyland,” a cosmopolitan city, at the borders between East and West, representing the religious syncretism and the fusion of cultures, worships and rituals of late antiquity. The setting of the play and its palimpsestic nature underlie the Athenian production of 2018-2019 directed by Katerina Evangelatos that unites diverse theatrical traditions, ranging from the magical world of the circus to Kyogen, and from slapstick comedy — replete with allusions to Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure and The Circus – to Meyerhold’s biomechanics. The performance depended on a central double mirror with revolving doors on a rotating base, as well as on the doubling of actors to address the mirroring and transformation of characters and the themes of optical illusion and loss of identity. Focusing on the visual and sound devices of the performance as well as on its mixture of comic genres and idioms, the essay explores its repossession of the composite material and theme of Shakespeare’s play.

In Act 2 Scene 2 of Richard II, Bushy advises the Queen against ‘looking awry’ upon the King’s departure, comparing her gaze first to a perspective glass and then to a perspective picture that appears distorted unless viewed at an angle. I rely on this metaphor of anamorphosis to examine two recent productions of Richard II in Athens, both of which ‘distort’ the text and situate it in a bleak context. Viewed from the angle of the current political discontent, the 2014 and 2016 adaptations, directed by Elli Papakonstantinou and Efi Birba respectively, assume distinct meaning for the Athenian audience.

By examining the retellings of the story of Venus’s love for Adonis in the English Renaissance, this paper analyzes the imagery associated with the goddess and her imaginary temples. Marlowe, Spenser and Shakespeare rework the myth in the context of the ekphrastic tradition, creating verbal descriptions of visual images which allow one narrative to enclose another; Hero’s “wide sleeves green, and border’d with a grove, / Where Venus in her naked glory strove / To please the careless and disdainful eyes / Of proud Adonis that before her lies (Hero and Leander 1.11-14) allude to Spenser's tapestry in Malecasta's castle portraying Venus with Adonis (Faerie Queene III.i.35–37), both adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses X.

Either depicted in an embroidered garment, a tapestry, or as an art object herself, Venus represents the complexity and ambiguity of the perception of love and desire in early modern England. Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, two of the most popular sixteenth-century epyllia, are not only obsessed with their own artifice, abounding in moments of self-reflexivity but also anxious about the sexual pleasure the period both cherishes and censors. By fixing Venus in place, as a visual representation, Elizabethan poets echo the words of Enobarbus describing Cleopatra as he and Antony first saw her:  “O'er-picturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature” (Anthony and Cleopatra 2.2.200–1). By “over [or out] picturing” Venus, Marlowe and Shakespeare show the goddess of love as both object and subject of desire. Venus emerges as a pagan and enigmatic force within the conflict between nature and art as well as within the poetic contest for the superior representation of artistic illusion.

In the ninth scene of Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris (1592), the duke of Guise breaks into Petrus Ramus’ study and after condemning him as the “flat dichotomist” (9.29) who dared to challenge Aristotelian scholasticism, orders his Catholic followers to stab him to death. In the beginning of the scene, Ramus, the French Huguenot humanist, iconoclastic philosopher, logician and educational reformer, is sitting in his study and reading a book; in the 55 lines that follow, combining senseless violence with pitiless black humour, he is attacked, insulted (as a superficial and vain thinker, an arrogant “peasant” and “collier’s son”) and killed by his aristocratic persecutors. By analyzing Marlowe’s version of Ramus’ murder during the St. Bartholomew's day massacre (1572), especially the oddly pedantic exchange between the Guise and Ramus, in which the latter not only defends his own philosophical positions but also criticizes his opponents, “one Scheckius” and “the blockish Sorbonnists” (9.43, 50), I intend to reflect on the figure of the murdered philosopher, both sad and ironic, in the eerily resonant context of fanaticism, sectarian violence and religious terrorism.
Marlowe elevates Ramus to the role of the massacre’s predominant victim, devoting even more lines to his murder than to Admiral Coligny’s and fictionalizing history: not only is there lack of evidence that the Duke of Guise ordered Ramus’ murder but he was also killed on the third day of the massacre, when the slaughter of the Protestants was almost over, a possible indication that the reasons for his killing went beyond his conversion to Protestantism. By killing the humanist, Marlowe does not merely oppose word and sword; while various sixteenth-century chroniclers portray Ramus as the central Protestant victim of the massacre, the playwright downplays the religious faith of the controversial philosopher, staging instead a purely academic argument as a heightened dramatic moment. Marlowe avoids any mention of Ramus’s religious beliefs in the scene, aware that his fame as Protestant martyr did not depend on his theology.
Therefore, Ramus’ significance in the play has not just to do with partisan politics, but mainly with contemporary concerns about educational politics and the socio-political role of the intellectual, issues Marlowe also explored in Doctor Faustus. In fact, it is Ramus’s scholarship that proves his undoing, the reason his nemesis the Duke of Guise has him killed. As soon as he enters the stage, Guise attacks Ramus’s philosophy, instead of his religion and sexuality as his followers did in the beginning of scene 9. Guise refers to Ramus’s notoriety as anti-Aristotelian, showing his academic conservatism as well as summarizing several of the anti-Ramist arguments that were starting to be popular at European universities, including Cambridge. Guise condemns Ramus for his “epitomes” and “axioms”, for his superficiality and reductive interpretations (9.30, 33); yet, the duke’s refutation is nothing more than a biased reduction of the philosopher’s own arguments. 
Guise’s accusation of Ramus for being a “flat dichotomist” (9.29), a word coined by Marlowe, refers to his using large dichotomies, set out in diagrams or tables as an instrument to display the structure of an art , each of which had to be founded on the method, the most important part of Ramist logic. The intention of this method depending on dichotomies was to make the curriculum useful to students of the humanities and to shorten the course of studies. Ramus’ educational reformation was clearly connected to social issues: as the son of farmer who had to work very hard to study—even as a servant--, he wanted to make the world of learning more accessible and less expensive to poor students by shortening the amount of time students put into studying and by simplifying their studies. So his aim was not to scoff Aristotle but to adapt the Organon to the service of learning, by removing its “confus[ions]” and abridging its form, enabling students to learn the art of logic more quickly. Taking into consideration Marlowe’s interest in creating scholars of low birth like Doctor Faustus who interact with the world of politics, the term “dichotomist” represents for Guise an othering even worse than being a Huguenot; the outsider demolishing accepted systems and hierarchies and threatening the academic and social establishment.
Guise’s order to stab Ramus (“Your nego argumentum / Cannot serve, sirrah. Kill him” 9.36–7) negates the philosopher’s theory that an argument made simply on authority is invalid. Still, Ramus’ request, “good my Lord, let me but speak a word”, interrupts the rapid brutality of play’s action, allowing philosophy to have a last (though not the last) word. Ramus explains that his final words are neither a plea for his life nor for the salvation of his soul, but a need to defend his right to philosophize. Not only does Marlowe represent here the powerful aristocrats as especially cruel and merciless, but he also elevates a minor character, a scholar and commoner to tragic status, going against the Aristotelian conventions of tragedy. Marlowe, a shoemaker’s son and scholarship student himself, invests on Ramus intellectual, social and sexual non-conformity, fashioning an ambivalent anti-martyr at once bookish and radical, passive and brave. His fascination with Ramus goes beyond the particular debates about the significance and depth of Ramist theories, which have in fact persisted for centuries; he delves into the limits and limitations of dialectic in the context of the set of ideas and attitudes known as “humanism” (or “humanities”, the English for humanitas), defined in Thomas Cooper’s Latin-English Dictionary of 1565 as “man’s nature: gentlenesse: courtesie: gentle behaviour: civilitie: pleasantness in manners: doctrine teaching: liberall knowledge”.
In the same way that Ramus’s educational reformation illustrates the relationship between humanist ideas and the social institutions and practices in which they developed, Marlowe’s fictional evocation of the humanist’s final speech emphasizes that reason demands free thinking rather than blindly following authorities, ancient or modern. Ramus defines himself as the true Aristotelian, following not the authority but the spirit of philosophy. Although Guise tries to disprove Ramus’s theories on logic by murdering him, the philosopher upholds his right to reason, to think freely in the face of fanaticism and terrorism. Instead of a prayer, the philosopher’s last words (9.41) are in support of his academic work, suggesting a resistant humanist subject.

When George Chapman dedicated his translation of Musaeus’ Hero and Leander to Inigo Jones, he praised the architect for his ‘ingenuous love to all works in which the ancient Greek souls have appeared to you’. Two decades earlier, in 1598, Chapman completed Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, adding his own adaptation of Musaeus to Marlowe’s translation. Chapman’s complex response not only to Marlowe’s poem but also to classical antiquity appears in the description of Hero’s scarf (sestiad 4.13–121), where Chapman, using the figure of a female artist, creates an intricate ekphrasis, modelled on Achilles’ shield, from a variety of Greek and Roman sources. As Hero weaves her elaborate scarf, Chapman alludes to the ekphrasis of Arachne’s tapestry in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6, while the embroidered scenes of the fisherman and the country maid and the foxes stem from Theocritus’ first Idyll. Hero’s needle is transformed into the translator’s pen initiating a collaboration between living and dead poets and linking Chapman to the ‘ancient Greek souls’. This paper seeks to unravel this thread of connections, reading the ekphrasis as a gendered trope for early modern creativity and as a reflection on the translation and appropriation of ancient sources.

This book combines legal as well as political and theoretical questions in a variety of contexts, ranging from legal issues in the early modern period to critical explorations of law/s, justice and textuality in contemporary literature and culture. The essays in this volume offer critical perspectives on the role of literature and theory in relation to the law and explore otherness and justice in early modern, Victorian and contemporary texts, postmodern theory, colonial and postcolonial contexts and popular culture. Examining how legal and literary narratives construct, repress, legitimise, but also enable the Other, this volume offers new insights into forms of alterity, marginality and exclusion and
articulates the imperative need to reconfigure issues of justice as always intertwined with the Other.

Lady Elizabeth Craven's epistolary travelogue, A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789), especially her letters from Athens, present not only the author's rivalry with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Turkish Embassy Letters but also a critical stance toward the Orient, which depends on the historical developments which turned Britain into a global power and on the change in aesthetic sensibilities from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century. Craven, who was the first woman travel writer to visit Athens, offers a fragmented and idiosyncratic vision of Greece, asserting her denial of the pursuit of antiquity displayed by Montagu. Rather than describe the antiquities, Craven produces picturesque depictions of private spaces, which were either ignored by or inaccessible to male travellers. Her descriptions represent a development in travel writing, determined not only by gender but also by the search for new sources of aesthetic pleasure.

Nineteenth-century Greece figured vividly in many Victorian popular novels, short fiction, travelogues, essays, poems, articles of public opinion, and even in advertisements which appeared in magazines, newspapers, and other publications. The diverse body of Victorian popular literature on Greece manifests the modern country’s focal position in the Victorian imagination. As a site of affiliations between the classical and the modern, the West and the East, Greece remained a constitutive part of the West and its imaginary tropes, civilization, the nation-state, and democracy. At the same time the new nation confused and often disappointed Victorians who were divided between restoring an idea of classical Greece as a modern epic and taking a critical and even mocking distance from the hybridity that Modern Greece represented.
This conference aims to explore the cultural relations and tensions that develop from the multifaceted representations of Greece in Victorian popular culture.

The collection seeks to explore the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. From James to Mann, Roth to Rhys, Benjamin to Burroughs, the hotel becomes more than a setting for contemporary modes of living dictated by tourism and leisure, and new technologies of transport. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing and art complicates binaries such as privacy and publicity, risk and rootedness, convention and experimentation. As a site of socio-cultural, psychic, and sexual negotiation and conflict, the hotel may be seen in this sense as a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter-and trans-literary, cultural, national and affective modes. This volume invites us to think of 'hotel modernisms' as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. To that end, we invite essays that engage with the hotel as a transcultural space of modernity of the period 1890-1950 in contexts and approaches which may include, but are not limited to, the following: modernist form; literary and artistic experimentation