Description
Book SynopsisWomen Writing Greece explores images of modern Greece by women who experienced the country as travellers, writers, and scholars, or who journeyed there through the imagination. The essays assembled here consider women's travel narratives, memoirs and novels, ranging from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing on the role of gender in travel and cross-cultural mediation and challenging stereotypical views of 'the Greek journey', traditionally seen as an antiquarian or Byronic pursuit. This collection aims to cast new light on women's participation in the discourses of Hellenism and Orientalism, examining their ideological rendering of Greece as at once a luminous land and a site crossed by contradictory cultural memories. Arranged chronologically, the essays discuss encounters with Greece by, among others, Lady Elizabeth Craven, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Montagu, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley, Felicia Skene, Emily Pfeiffer, Eva Palmer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, Christa Wolf, Penelope Storace and Gillian Bouras, and analyse them through a variety of critical, historical, contextual and theoretical frames.
Table of ContentsVassiliki KOLOCOTRONI and Efterpi MITSI: Introduction Efterpi MITSI: Lady Elizabeth Craven’s Letters from Athens and the Female Picturesque Vassiliki MARKIDOU: Travels Off-centre: Lady Hester Stanhope in Greece Evgenia SIFAKI: A Gendered Vision of Greekness: Lady Morgan’s Woman: Or Ida of Athens Maria KOUNDOURA: Real Selves and Fictional Nobodies: Women’s Travel Writing and the Production of Identities Churnjeet KAUR MAHN: The Sculpture and the Harem: Ethnography in Felicia Skene’s Wayfaring Sketches TD OLVERSON: ‘A world without woman in any true sense’: Gender and Hellenism in Emily Pfeiffer’s Flying Leaves from East and West Martha KLIRONOMOS: British Women Travellers to Greece, 1880-1930 Artemis LEONTIS: Eva Palmer’s Distinctive Greek Journey Christina DOKOU: ‘No Place Like Home’: Gillian Bouras and the ‘Others’ Helga RAMSEY-KURZ: Going Back to the Mother: Postcolonial Inscriptions and Migrant Tales Asimina KARAVANTA: The Greek Ideal in Patricia Storace’s Dinner with Persephone and Christa Wolf’s Cassandra Contributors Index
