Victorians and Modern Greece

Efterpi Mitsi is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her publications focus on classical reception in English literature, travellers to Greece, and word and image relations. She is the author of Greece in Early English Travel Writing, 1596–1682 (2017), editor of Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader (2019), and co-editor of six volumes, including Hotel Modernisms (2023) and Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (2019). She was the principal investigator of the research project "Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture" (2019–2023) funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation. Anna Despotopoulou is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research and publications focus on representations of gender, space, and mobility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. She is the author of Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 (2015), and she has co-edited six books, including Hotel Modernisms (2023), Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (2019), and Henry James and The Supernatural (2011). Her research project, "Hotels and the Modern Subject, 1890–1940" (2019–2023), was funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, and she also participated in the project "Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture."

Efterpi Mitsi and Anna Despotopoulou,

Introduction

Part I: Travels

1. Sebastian Marshall,

Christopher Wordsworth’s Greece: Popular Topography from the Illustrated Serial to the Gift Book

2. Chryssa Marinou,

William M. Thackeray in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Athens

3. Roberta Micallef,

The Incongruous Greece of Lady Annie Brassey

Part II: Periodicals

4. Konstantina Georganta,

The Cretan Question in Punch Magazine, 1869-1898.

5. Efterpi Mitsi,

Fashioning Greece in The Woman’s World

6. Mathilde Pyrli,

“Deliciously primitive”: Insular Greece through the Eyes of Theodore Bent, 1883-1888

Part III: Fictions

7. Maria Schoina,

“[A] bold and dangerous freedom”: Representations of Greece in Mary Shelley’s Late Fiction

8. Anna Despotopoulou,

Held to Ransom: The Adventures of Greece in Victorian Popular Fiction

9. Vassiliki Kolocotroni,

“Doing one’s own little share”: Weaponising Smallness in Isabella Fyvie Mayo’s A Daughter of the Klephts, or a Girl of Modern Greece

Part IV: Synchronies

10. Churnjeet Mahn,

Whiteness in Ruins: Victorian Women Writers in Greece

11. Michèle Mendelssohn,

A Janus-Faced Friend: Oscar Wilde and Modern Greece’s Queer Future

12. Victoria Mills,

“Greece at last!”: Desire, Aesthetics, and the Ecology of Ruin in Vernon Lee’s Greek Travel Writing

David Roessel,

Afterword