A wide-ranging study of popular poetry and songs from the end of the Byzantine Empire to the present.

Placing Modern Greece is about literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke claims that the imagining of and attitude towards Greece was shaped by a fascination with the material, and by the highly conceptualized tension between the ideal on the one hand, and the material on the other. Her study focuses on nature and landscape imagery as vehicles of representation, on their specific inner workings, and on their dynamic, which conditions how and whether Greece as a modern entity in the making can be represented at all. Offering readings from German and contemporaneous Greek authors, Guthenke supplies a commentary on the translation and crossings of representational models and their limits.

This book focuses on the figure of Charos, widespread throughout the Hellenic world, including Cyprus and the Pontus region, and the folk mythology of modern Greece. Michał Bzinkowski, analyzing Greek demotic songs, especially mirologia (dirges) and the songs of the Underworld and Charos, as well as an Acritic cycle of alleged Byzantine origin, sets out to ascertain the characteristics of this enigmatic and ambiguous personage.

An investigation of literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke explores the imaginative construction of the Greek nation in light of the literary strategies and constraints of Romantic aesthetics.