In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination

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Oxford University Press, Nov 29, 2001 - Literary Criticism - 416 pages
Modern Greece, constructed by the early nineteenth-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been "haunted, holy ground" in English and American literature for almost two centuries. In Byron's Shadow analyzes how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of "Greece" to suit changing eras.

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Contents

Almost Impossible to Think Sanely about Greece
3
I PAST GREATNESS AND PRESENT DEBASEMENT 17701833
11
II THE MAGIC FORCE OF LEGEND 18331913
99
III THE END OF AMBROSIA AND BRIGANDS 19141939
185
A New Kind of Byronism
252
Notes
285
Bibliography
339
Index
379
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Page 51 - Persian's grave, I could not deem myself a slave. A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis; And ships by thousands lay below, And men in nations — all were his...
Page 75 - The sword, the banner, and the field, Glory and Greece, around me see! The Spartan, borne upon his shield, Was not more free.
Page 77 - Maid of Athens, ere we part, Give, oh, give me back my heart! Or, since that has left my breast, Keep it now, and take the rest! Hear my vow before I go, ZtoT) p,ou, ads d^aira>. By those tresses unconfined, Woo'd by each /Egean wind; By those lids whose jetty fringe Kiss thy soft cheeks...
Page 51 - Must we but blush? — Our fathers bled. Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead ! Of the three hundred grant but three. To make a new Thermopylae!
Page 218 - Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants Cif London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
Page 31 - We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. But for Greece — Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis, of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters ; or, what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China and Japan possess.
Page 47 - Fair Greece ! sad relic of departed worth ! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! Who now shall lead thy scatter'd children forth, And long accustom'd bondage uncreate? Not such thy sons who whilome did await, The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, In bleak Thermopylae's sepulchral strait— Oh ! who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurotas' banks, and call thee from the tomb?
Page 132 - Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.
Page 88 - AT midnight, in his guarded tent, The Turk was dreaming of the hour When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent, Should tremble at his power ; In dreams, through camp and court, he bore The trophies of a conqueror ; In dreams his song of triumph heard. Then wore his monarch's signet ring, Then pressed that monarch's throne — a King ; As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing, As Eden's garden bird.
Page 50 - And he who in the strife expires Will add to theirs a name of fear That Tyranny shall quake to hear. And leave his sons a hope, a fame. They too will rather die than shame: For Freedom's battle once begun. Bequeathed by bleeding Sire to Son, Though baffled oft. is ever won.

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