Inleiding in de Nieuwgriekse literatuur. Van de 12de tot de 21ste eeuw by Pieter Borghart (review)

With the first and last history of Modern Greek literature written in Dutch dating from 1921, the year D.C. Hesseling’s Geschiedenis der Nieuwgrieksche letterkunde was published, Pieter Borghart’s new introduction to Modern Greek literature aspires to fill a long gap. Deviating from Hesseling’s example, Borghart favors the term “introduction” to the term “history” in the title, a choice consistent with the book’s objectives and intended audience. His study is not addressed to specialists, but, as Borghart explains in the book’s concise introduction, it is meant as a handbook for students of Modern Greek literature in the Netherlands and Flanders, as well as a guide or reference work for Dutch-speaking readers wishing to get acquainted with, and to contextualize their readings of, Greek literature. The book’s intended readership also explains the extensive historical background provided in each chapter. While some of this information may be common knowledge for (many) Greek readers, it is certainly helpful for foreign readers with little prior knowledge of the historical, cultural, and ideological forces that influenced (and were influenced by) Greek literary production.

In the introduction, the question of why write a new history of Modern Greek literature is answered by pinpointing the shortcomings of existing histories. These are either outdated (e.g. by Hesseling in 1921, K. Th Dimaras in 1949, Linos Politis in 1974, and Mario Vitti in 1971, although the new edition of the latter study in 2003 is acknowledged); too brief (e.g. Denis Kohler’s and Pavlos Tzermias’s overviews, although the latter is certainly not as brief as Borghart suggests); and thematically or temporally limited (such as Roderick Beaton’s Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, which starts in 1821). Borghart notes that even Beaton’s Introduction (1994) is nearing its twentieth birthday, but does not acknowledge here the revisions in the updated edition of Beaton’s work in 1999.

The starting point of Borghart’s study is the twelfth century. He rejects Hesseling’s choice of 1453 as the beginning of Modern Greek literature. Hesseling indeed excluded works in Greek before 1453 from his History, but he had already treated Byzantine literature up to 1453 in his book Byzantium (1902), to which the History (1921) functions as a follow-up. The coterminous existence of archaic and demotic language in Greek literature for centuries and the impact of earlier works in archaic Greek on Modern Greek literature also make Borghart skeptical to Politis’s, Dimaras’s, and Vitti’s emphasis on the vernacular in determining the beginning of Greek literature. Based on the criterion of collective consciousness, theoretically grounded in Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” he situates his beginning in the emergence of a “sense of proto-national identity” (Borghart 2012: 8).¹ He finds this in the twelfth-century Comnenian Renaissance of ancient culture and literature, and specifically in early Medieval Greek romances.

The announced endpoint is the present (the twenty-first century), and the most recent works discussed are Rhea Galanaki’s Judas’ Fires, Oedipus’ Ashes and Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou’s graphic novel Logicomix, both from 2009. However, these exceptions aside, hardly any other twenty-first century works are mentioned. Twenty-first century literature is underrepresented, and thus the book’s actual scope reaches the end of the twentieth century.

The book comprises eight chapters. In the first three, the titles feature historical periods. Chapter 1, “Comnenian Renaissance,” covers twelfth-century Greek romances, begging poems, and the epic of Διγενής Ακρίτης. The emphasis is on the narrative structures of these works, theories about their origins and popularity, and their ideological functions. The second chapter focuses on genres during the “Palaiologan Dynasty”: chronicles in the vernacular, animal stories, and late Byzantine Greek romances. Borghart lays out theories concerning the heteregeneous language of these romances, and privileges the approach...