Principal Investigator: Efterpi Mitsi, Professor in English Literature and Culture, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
“Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture” (REVICTO) is a project funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) under the “First Call for HFRI Research Projects to support Faculty members and researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant”. The project investigateσ the ways in which British Victorian popular literature and culture represented and interpreted nineteenth-century Greece in magazines, journals, and other publications, with an aim to contribute to the scholarship on the cultural affiliations between Britain and Greece in the Victorian period. Although scholars have examined the significance of ancient Greece as a symbolic territory for British culture, the role that Modern Greece played in the Victorian popular imagination is relatively unmapped. The exploration of the literary and cultural exchange between Britain and Greece in the period of the latter’s formation as a nation state has also led to revisiting questions such as:
To what extent does the proliferation of literary and popular texts on Modern Greece forge a new discourse and ideology about Greece and its equivocal position within Europe?
Is there an alternative discourse to the dichotomy between a romanticized or reviled Greece?
Our research seeks not only to explore the representation of Greece in Victorian culture, but also to trace the literary and cultural exchange between Britons and Greeks in that period, documenting an active encounter rather than a passive reception. Moreover, our project is facilitated by the advance in digital humanities, especially in Victorian Studies, as many nineteenth-century popular sources, such as journals, newspapers, and ephemera have been digitized; in fact, our research intends to be part of the field of digital literary scholarship. During the three year duration of the project (2019-2023), we have organized an international conference and research workshops as well as disseminated our research through publications and presentations at international conferences.