Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850

Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean investigates the long process of transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states by narrating the biographies of a group of people who were born within empires but came of age surrounded by the emerging vocabulary of nationalism, much of which they themselves created. It is the story of a generation of intellectuals and political thinkers from the Ionian Islands who experienced the collapse of the Republic of Venice and the dissolution of the common cultural and political space of the Adriatic, and who contributed to the creation of Italian and Greek nationalisms. By uncovering this forgotten intellectual universe, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean retrieves a world characterized by multiple cultural, intellectual, and political affiliations that have since been buried by the conventional narrative of the formation of nation-states. Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean rethinks the origins of Italian and Greek nationalisms and states, highlighting the intellectual connection between the Italian peninsula, Greece, and Russia, and reestablishing the lost link between the changing geopolitical contexts of western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans in the Age of Revolutions. It re-inscribes important intellectuals and political figures, considered 'national fathers' of Italy and Greece (such as Ugo Foscolo, Dionysios Solomos, Ioannis Kapodistrias and Niccolò Tommaseo), into their regional and multicultural context, and shows how nations emerged from an intermingling, rather than a clash, of ideas concerning empire and liberalism, Enlightenment and religion, revolution and conservatism, and East and West.

Konstantina Zanou is Assistant Professor of Italian, specializing in Mediterranean Studies, in the Italian Department at Columbia University. She is a historian of the long nineteenth century in the Mediterranean. Her research focuses on issues of intellectual and literary history, biography, and microhistory, with a special emphasis on Italy (the Risorgimento), the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman world, Greece, the Ionian Islands, and Russia. She is also a student of modern diasporas and of the trajectories and ideas of people on the move. She has co-edited (with Maurizio Isabella) the volume Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (2016).

- List of Illustrations - Acknowledgements - Note on Transliteration - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - Part I: One Island, Three (Trans)National Poets - 1: Ugo Foscolo: A Life of Stammering in Exile - 2: The Staggering of Andreas Kalvos - 3: Dionysios Solomos: A Life in Translation - Part II: Imperial Nationalism between Religion and Revolution - 4: The Russian Adriatic - 5: Diasporic Lives Across Empires and Nations - 6: Conservative Liberalism and Pan-Christian Utopianism in Post-Napoleonic Europe - 7: The Greek Revolution through the eyes of Orthodox Enlightenment - Part III: Memoirs of Lives Suspended Between Patrias - 8: A Life in Absence: Mario Pieri - 9: Andrea Papadopoulo Vretto between East and West - Part IV: Intellectuals as 'Bridges' across the Sea - 10: An Unknown 'Miracle': Andrea Mustoxidi - 11: The Greco- and Dalmato-Venetian Intellectuals After the End of the Serenissima - 12: A Trans-Adriatic Programme for the Regeneration of Greek Letters - Epilogue - Bibliography - Index