‘From Novelistic Romance to Romantic Novel’: The Revival of the Ancient Adventure Chronotope in Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature

This paper deals with the presence of Bakhtin’s adventure chronotope in the ancient Greek novel (first centuries AD) and its re-appearance in the Byzantine novel (12th century) and modern Greek romantic novel (1830–1850). Unlike previous scholarship on Bakhtin, which has adopted chronotopical analysis almost exclusively for the purpose of chronological literary history, our semiotic approach to narrative genres addresses diachronic similarities between three generic variants by taking into account cultural-historical circumstances. We argue that these similarities consist of a highly specific combination of (1) a certain degree of (proto-) ethnical awareness primarily based on the classical heritage of the 5th and 4th centuries BC (‘Hellenism’), and (2) a fundamental unease among the literati with the prevailing political climate. In our view, both circumstances found an adequate mode of expression in the narrative syntax of the adventure novel.