The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter's loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts's case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades,The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.

In this volume an attempt is made to tackle Hellenism as a global and transcultural entity. Through an array of essays, this book constitutes a comparative study of various literary, cultural and artistic trends as these develop throughout the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. Having been designed with the general as well as the specialized reader in mind, this book will prove to be a valuable guide to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to a broad spectrum of readers with an interest in comparative literature, cultural history, history of the classical heritage, transatlantic studies, English and American romantic, modernist and postmodernist narratives. Its diverse material falls under the umbrella terms of “English Hellenisms” and “American Hellenisms” with the intention of enhancing intercultural dialogue and understanding. By embracing multivocality, as proven by the number of articles it contains, this book proves the tenacity, diachronic and intercontinental appeal of Hellenism at the era of multiculturalism and globalization.

In her discussion of both modern and ancient Greek texts, she reconsiders mainstream poetics in the light of a marginal national literature. Leontis examines in particular how the Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis both incorporate ancient texts and use experimental techniques in their poetry.

Although Apollonius of Rhodes' extraordinary epic poem on the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece has begun to get the attention it deserves, it still is not well known to many readers and scholars. This book explores the poem's relation to the conditions of its writing in third century BCE Alexandria, where a multicultural environment transformed the Greeks' understanding of themselves and the world. Apollonius uses the resources of the imagination - the myth of the Argonauts' voyage and their encounters with other peoples - to probe the expanded possibilities and the anxieties opened up when definitions of Hellenism and boundaries between Greeks and others were exposed to question. Central to this concern with definitions is the poem's representation of space. Thalmann uses spatial theories from cultural geography and anthropology to argue that the Argo's itinerary defines space from a Greek perspective that is at the same time qualified. Its limits are exposed, and the signs with which the Argonauts mark space by their passage preserve the stories of their complex interactions with non-Greeks. The book closely considers many episodes in the narrative with regard to the Argonauts' redefinition of space and the implications of their actions for the Greeks' situation in Egypt, and it ends by considering Alexandria itself as a space that accommodated both Greek and Egyptian cultures.

This is a comparative textual analysis of a body of relatively neglected works by Greek Australian writers Dimitris Tsaloumas, Antigone Kefala, Stylianos Charkianakis, Dean Kalimnios, Christos Tsiolkas, Fotini Epanomitis and Helen Koukoutsis. The focus is on reading their texts as a bridge between multiculturalism and world literature given each writer identifies in various ways with peripheral cosmopolitanism as they merge high-brow literary forms with the quotidian paramythi, or the storytelling oral tradition. The different ways they do this registers the writers’ ambivalent relationship with their origins through their transculturally mediated expression. Discovering new possibilities in literary texts which have oral traces becomes a productive way to look at the question of translatability as posed by scholars of multiculturalism and world literature, such as Sneja Gunew, Emily Apter and Pheng Cheah.

Greece today finds itself caught on a turbulent edge of Europe, yet both high culture and popular myth have long placed Greece as a locus of Western civilisation, reinforced by English travellers' 'discovery' of Greece in the late-eighteenth century and the impact this had on English Literature. Opening up fresh avenues of discourse, Maria Koundoura maps what this dual representation signifies for Greeks, both national and diasporic. In doing so, she touches on twentieth-century diaspora cultures from Europe to the United States, offering a new critical paradigm from which to explore national and transnational identities. Koundoura deftly draws upon postcolonial theory to address and analyse the cultural material that has produced Greece's representation as both 'European' and 'other'.

An interdisciplinary study of the dynamic relationship between space and society through case studies across the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.