This volume casts a fresh look at the multifaceted expressions of diachronic Hellenisms. A distinguished group of historians, classicists, anthropologists, ethnographers, cultural studies, and comparative literature scholars contribute essays exploring the variegated mantles of Greek ethnicity, and the legacy of Greek culture for the ancient and modern Greeks in the homeland and the diaspora, as well as for the ancient Romans and the modern Europeans. Given the scarcity of books on diachronic Hellenism in the English-speaking world, the publication of this volume represents nothing less than a breakthrough. The book provides a valuable forum to reflect on Hellenism, and is certain to generate further academic interest in the topic. The specific contribution of this volume lies in the fact that it problematizes the fluidity of Hellenism and offers a much-needed public dialogue between disparate viewpoints, in the process making a case for the existence and viability of such a polyphony. The chapters in this volume offer a reorientation of the study of Hellenism away from a binary perception to approaches giving priority to fluidity, hybridity, and multi-vocality. The volume also deals with issues of recycling tradition, cultural category, and perceptions of ethnicity. Topics explored range from European Philhellenism to Hellenic Hellenism, from the Athens 2004 Olympics to Greek cinema, from a psychoanalytical engagement with anthropological material to a subtle ethnographic analysis of Greek-American women's material culture. The readership envisaged is both academic and non-specialist; with this aim in mind, all quotations from ancient and modern sources in foreign languages have been translated into English.

Examines in detail the local, historical, and material circumstances that distinguish different types of Roman Hellenism

This work addresses political and historiographical uses of history. A group of leading historians and thinkers discuss questions of collective identity and representation in relation to the fluctuating concept of "Past" and its changing relevance. Among the topics are Greek historiographical questions, Balkan history, the Armenian problem, and the Plaestine historical narrative.

"A History of the Greek Language" is a kaleidoscopic collection of ideas on the development of the Greek language through the centuries of its existence.

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational "others." The book describes the diverse strategies they used--from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean "signifyin(g)"--to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities--Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and "part-white and Methodist"--to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the postcolonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson's "Ulysses," Yeats's "No Second Troy," C.P. Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Walcott's Omeros. Martin McKinsey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Sample Text

Ancient Persia in Western History is a measured rejoinder to the dominant narrative that considers the Graeco-Persian Wars to be merely the first round of an oft-repeated battle between the despotic 'East' and the broadly enlightened 'West'. Sasan Samiei analyses the historiography which has skewed our understanding of this crucial era - contrasting the work of Edward Gibbon and Goethe, which venerated Classicism and Hellenistic history, with later writers such as John Linton Myres. Finally, Samiei explores the cross-cultural encounters which constituted the Achaemenid period itself, and repositions it as essential to the history of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.