The Eve of the Greek Revival: British Travellers' Perceptions of Early Nineteenth-Century Greece (review)

154 Reviews according to the author? Does any driver who inscribes his automobile or, as the conclusion seems to suggest, do the farmer and the truck-driver (lumped into the same social class)? In either case, what are the implications for a discipline that is struggling to redefine itself while its traditional subject is absorbed by modernity? In light of exciting scholarly discussion that seeks to revitalize the study of folklore and to explore that discipline's relationship with other disciplines such as anthropology and literary theory, this is an appropriate moment for Greek folklore studies to participate in this discussion. However, to do so necessitates the abandonment of the discipline's current sociological simulations and its tendency to fragment culture into distinct, quantifiable traits. The movement away from statistical profiles and the authoritative imposition of meaning may take us through the "windscreen of appearances" into the symbolic domain of social relations, where we can explore how inscribed cultural texts are being embodied, negotiated, or redefined in everyday social practice. Georgios Anagnostu The Ohio State University Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis. The Eve of the Greek Revival: British Travellers' Perceptions of Early Nineteenth-Century Greece. London and New York: Routledge. 1990. Pp. 289. $52.00. What value do we find in travelers' representations of Greece? This question interests not just investors in topographical materials but also historians , anthropologists, and cultural critics. Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis offers an unusual response. Rather than discuss travelers' perceptions of Greece vis-à -vis their own investment in Hellenism, something others have done before, she examines their accounts collectively in order to extract information about the contemporary world they describe. Her comparative study of sources yields a well-organized descriptive account of Ottoman Greece's geography, demographics, institutions, ethnic groups, literary culture , and forms of labor and exchange during the early nineteenth century. One of the book's contributions is bibliographical. The author has compiled a useful list of travel writings on Greece from 1800 to 1821, a peak period of British travel. This body of works, though historically circumscribed, is large and scattered. Furthermore, the information it provides collectively is fragmentary in individual texts. Yet Angelomatis-Tsougarakis manages to scrutinize and compare over one hundred British, French, and Italian texts, including some diaries and journals found in manuscript in several British and one Parisian library. She makes use of several Greek sources. Finally, she cites the requisite secondary readings. Reviews 155 As any good annotated bibliography ought to do, TL· Eve of the Greek Revival gives a clear idea of what to expect in the sources, while it also provides the reader with a general context for reading them. An introductory chapter on "British Travellers in Greece, 1800-21" discusses the travelers' backgrounds , the economic theories to which they subscribed, their education, professions, motives for traveling, patterns in taste, the political climate they left behind, the intellectual and material baggage they carried with them, and the routes they most frequently followed. We are reminded that the British in particular "seemed to think that they could legitimately consider themselves to be the real descendants of the ancient Greeks" (23). Other chapters fill in the details. In Chapter 4, entitled "Education and Culture," we learn about "the extremely poor opinion most travellers had of the Greek Orthodox Church and its clergy" (120), as well as about their collective tendency to complain about Greek music as an offence to the ears and nerves (144). We begin to understand uieir prejudices, some of which remind us of history's ironic turns. Chapter 3, on "The Institutions and the People," informs us that travelers in the early nineteenth century despised the Albanians less than the Greeks because they "saw them as people with aspirations to whom the future belonged" (108). But The Eve of the Greek Revival makes more than a bibliographical contribution. It uses travel literature to examine critically the period prior to the Greek revolution "in an attempt to compensate for or supplement the deficiency in other sources" (211). Thus it compiles important information about a world that no longer exists. Users of roads in the south Balkans inform us about what roads there were. Prejudices notwithstanding, travelers' accounts also give...