Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire

Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire explores two key historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike. In the midst of the highly charged context of West-East confrontation and with fundamental cultural and political issues at stake, these episodes prove to be exciting and important platforms from which to reexamine the age-old conflict. This book reaches beyond the standard sources to dig into the archives for important events that have fallen through the cracks of the study of emerging modern Greece and the Ottoman Empire. These events, in which French travel writing, literary fiction, antiquarianism, and nineteenth-century western and eastern geopolitics merge, invite us to redraw the outlines of mutually dependent Hellenism and Orientalism.

GONDA VAN STEEN, N. A. Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida, USA.

"Gonda Van Steen's immensely learned and engaging "Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire" uses these traveler's tales of Marcellus as a platform to reinvestigate age-old and newly urgent West-East conflicts. . . . She deftly works with Romanticism, art and theatre history, performance studies, political science, literary and cultural theory, and travel and tourism; throughout, she figuratively picks up an artifact, analyzes it from one perspective, arguing persuasively for the view captured in that perspective, then turns the object and analyzes it yet again, from a different disciplinary perspective. This layered analysis gives the study its satisfying feeling of thoroughness while it illustrates the complications involved in trying to understand a text or event and the potential blindnesses of staying rigidly within our disciplinary boundaries."--"Bryn Mawr Classical Review"
"The breadth of scholarship that Van Steen commands is truly impressive. There are few other books that demonstrate such mastery over so many different bodies of scholarship (history, theater studies, literary criticism, etc.) in so many different languages. Just as impressive is her command of critical theory. The book takes on the literatures on the Balkan Enlightenment, on travel in an imperial context, on Orientalism, and on the cultural history of imperialism. Through her sophisticated analysis of them, Van Steen opens up new ways of thinking about the contest between the expanding western European empires and the emergent state of Greece for proprietorship of the legacy of ancient Greek culture. In sum, this is an exceptionally important book: erudite, sophisticated, and innovative."--Thomas W. Gallant, Nicholas Family Endowed Chair of Modern Greek History, University of California-San Diego