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Toward a Redefinition of Greek Romanticism Elizabeth Constantinides The whole question of Greek Romanticism—its particular characteristics , its representatives, its chronological limits—needs reexamination now that the passage of time has given us historical perspective . Such a reexamination is especially appropriate in view of the recent publication in Greece of two noteworthy collections of studies, K. Th. Dimaras' Ελληνικός Ï• ωμαντισμός, and a special number of the periodical Ε Î-α Εστία devoted to Greek Romanticism. The essays in these volumes bear incontrovertible witness to the enormous influence of Western European letters and thought on the writers of nineteenth -century Greece. It is my purpose in this paper to examine certain widespread assumptions that underlie Greek scholarly writing on Romanticism and to suggest a somewhat different approach. My discussion is to be taken as a schematic overview; I intend to elaborate this material elsewhere. A few words are in order about the nature of Romanticism in general. The meaning of Romanticism has been a subject of controversy since the word "romantic" was first popularized around 1800 as a term applied to a type of literature by the Schlegel brothers and by Madame de Staël. By the 1830s, after decades of manifestoes, quarrels, and debates, so many meanings had been attached to the term that Alfred de Musset in 1836 composed a satirical piece, Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, making fun of the confusion. The first of these "letters" describes the determined efforts of two fictional gentlemen to discover the real meaning of romantisme: is it a disregard of the unities of Aristotle and other "classical" norms? A commingling of the tragic and the comic? An imitation of the gloom, melancholy and ghoulishness found in English and German poetry? Or of the bloodsoaked Spanish poetry? And so on. The discussion continued in European literary circles for one hundred years and produced, as one scholar wryly remarked, 11,396 books on Romanticism (Lucas, 3). In 1924 an important article by the philosopher A. O. Lovejoy claimed that Romanticism had no single meaning, indeed that it 121 122 Elizabeth Constantinides meant so many things when applied to different authors that it was best used in the plural, "romanticisms," if at all (232-234). The distinguished comparatist René Wellek argued in 1949 against Lovejoy 's thesis and posited three broad characteristics that distinguished the writers of the Romantic Age: "imagination for the view of poetry , nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style" ("Concept" 161). Earlier, in 1943, Jacques Barzun had assumed the essential unity of the movement in his Romanticism and the Modern Ego, as had Paul Van Tieghem in Le Romantisme dans la littérature européenne (1948). Since Wellek's article the majority of scholars have come to accept the conclusion he argued, that there was such a thing as a Romantic Movement in Europe, and that, with variations in individual countries, it was a unified European movement.1 Greek scholars and critics are in unanimous agreement that there was indeed such a thing as a Romantic Age in Greek literature also. With hardly any exceptions they limit the period to the years 1830-1880. Although they see Romantic influences and traits in the poetry of Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Kalvos, and the other Heptanesians , they use the term romantiki almost exclusively to signify the writers of the so-called Old Athenian School, whose main spokesmen were the brothers Alexandros and Panayiotis Soutsos, Yeoryios Zalokostas , Alexandros Rangavis, and Achilleas Paraschos. This period is considered to have ended with the maturation of Kostis PaIamas and his generation. Occasionally critics notice some vestiges or prolongations of Romanticism in the works of Palamas and his contemporaries , but the so-called generation of 1880 is hailed as a new period in Greek literature, to be sharply distinguished from the writers of the preceding one. As recent examples of this periodization, I shall mention first the work of two eminent scholars, K. Th. Dimaras and Linos Politis, whose views are noteworthy because they have written histories of the entirety of Modern Greek literature as well as special studies of the Greek Romantic period. The histories of both Dimaras and Politis discuss the works of Solomos and Kalvos...

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