In Byron's Shadow

Modern Greece, constructed by the early 19th-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been haunted, holy ground in English and American literature for almost two centuries. This text analyzes how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of Greece to suit changing eras. Complementing and complicating Edward Said's view of relations between East and West, Roessel discusses the way perceptions of modern Greece have been shaped by historical events, arguing that the Greek struggle for independence became a touchstone in the English and American imagination of the 19th century, and that 20th-century Greece became a symbol of the attitudes and ideals that many believed caused the Great War.