Books in the British School at Athens - Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies series

In this collection, an eminent authority on the history of political thought and on the intellectual history of modern Hellenism employs his twin academic specializations in political science and in intellectual history to understand the intricacies of the historical experience of his native island.

This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing ΓÇÖproofΓÇÖ of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.

This book explores the concept of the Levant as a component of the regional and international system during the age of imperialism. At its heart is a focus on the experience of Greek-speaking societies and the independent state of Greece from 1830. A key sub-theme running through the account is the Anglo-Hellenic connection stemming from an enhanced British presence in the Eastern Mediterranean from the 1830s and 1840s. The core of the volume deals with three interlocking themes: modernity, nationalism and trans-nationalism. Ultimately these forces were to prove at odds with the ambiguity and elite structures that characterized the Levant in its nineteenth-century heyday.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and with British political influence over Greece soon to be ceded to the United States, there was a considerable degree of cultural interaction between Greek and British literati. Sponsored or assisted by the British Council, this interaction was notable for its diversity and quality alike. Indeed, the British Council in Greece made a more significant contribution to local culture in that period than at any other time, and perhaps in any other country. Many of the participants ΓÇô among them Patrick Leigh Fermor, Steven Runciman, and Louis MacNeice ΓÇô are well known, while others deserve to be better known than they are today. But what has been less fully discussed, and what the volume sets out to do, is to explore the two-way relations between Greek and British literary production in which the British Council played a particularly important role until the outbreak of armed conflict in Cyprus in 1955, which rendered further contacts of this kind difficult. Close attention is paid to the variety of ways ΓÇô marked by personal affinities and allegiances, but also by political tensions ΓÇô in which the British Council functioned as an agent of interaction in a climate where a complex blend of traditional Anglophilia or Philhellenism found itself encountering a new post-war and Cold War environment. What is distinctive about the volume, beyond the inclusion of much recent archival research, is its attention to the British Council as part of the story of Greek letters, and not just as a place in which various British men and women of letters worked. The British Council found itself, sometimes more through improvisation and personal affinities than through careful planning, at the heart of some key developments, notably in terms of important periodical publications which had a lasting influence on Greek letters. Though in the cultural forum that influence was arguably to be less pervasive than that of France, with its more ambitious cultural outreach, or than that of the USA in later decades, the role of the British Council in Greece in this crucial period of Greek (and indeed European) post-war history continues to make a rich case study in cultural politics. This volume thus fills a gap in the rich bibliography on Anglo-Greek relations and contributes to a wider scholarly and public discussion about cultural politics.

This maritime anthropology volume presents a cosmology of ships. In order for this cosmology to be written, some of the volume¿s contributors have travelled on ships and interviewed mariners, fishermen, boat-builders and boat-dwellers; others have traced the courses of ships in poems, films, philosophical texts, and collective myths of genealogy and heritage. Overall the volume shows where ships can go, and how they are perceived and experienced by those living and travelling in them, watching and waiting for them, dreaming and writing about them, and, finally, what literal and metaphorical crews man them.

This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. Thi

This book explores the concept of the Levant as a component of the regional and international system during the age of imperialism. At its heart is a focus on the experience of Greek-speaking societies and the independent state of Greece from 1830. A key sub-theme running through the account is the Anglo-Hellenic connection stemming from an enha

This volume presents a wide-ranging exploration of modern receptions of ancient Greek material culture in various modern cultural traditions and practices, such as literature, architecture and the fine and performing arts, and spans the seventeenth century to the present day. The volume is distinctive because it brings together a variety of arti