REVICTO

Website: https://revictoproject.com/

"Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture", a research project funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (HFRI), investigates the ways in which 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. An investigation of the literary and cultural exchange between Britain and Greece in the period of the latter’s formation as a nation state may also lead 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.

Οur 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.