Kazantzakis the Greek?: Travel and Leisure, Hunger and Pathos, Localism and Cosmopolitanism in Nikos Kazantzakis's Journeying

Nikos Kazantzakis's travel writing spans his entire life and accounts for some of his earliest writing and his last published work before his death. Along with the work of Kostas Ouranis, it has established him as one of the earliest exponents of a literary vein of this genre in Greece that coincided with a prolific period of his travel writing in the 1920s, and, in particular, in his volume Journeying (1927). His preoccupation with larger issues set beyond Greek borders, especially global ideological struggles, has bolstered the author's cosmopolitan credentials in Greek letters. However, events in Greece do, in fact, condition Kazantzakis's perspectives on social, political, economic, and cultural issues abroad. An analysis of the synergies of home (oikos) abroad demonstrates how the cosmopolitan genre of travel writing, for all its attempts to locate collectivities beyond nation borders, often restates the fixities of the self and/in the nation. I also trace the recurring typologies behind Kazantzakis's concerns as well as the religious fixations that underpin and mark them.