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Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 2016
The paper brings together three rather unlikely texts, the thirteenth-century Byzantine romance The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne, the thirteenth-century Old French Roman de la Rose, and the fifteenth-century Italian prose romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which are characterized by their lengthy dream narratives in which a first-person narrator is initiated in the art and the mysteries of love. Focusing on a group of instructive speeches contained within or indirectly connected with these dream narratives, this paper examines instruction as an integral component of the initiation process and as a powerful rhetorical tool moving the narrative – and the love story of the protagonist couple – forward. In doing so, the paper also highlights the ideas about love expressed in each of the three romances, the ways that they interconnect and the ways that they differ.
EVEN THE MOST OBSCURE GREEK POET today considers himself to be a member of the same literary and linguistic community as Homer. The history of Greek literature is coextensive with the history of the Greek language, and language is the main field in which the collective memory, the constitution and the self-image of a community are asserted. The National Book Centre has brought together the wealth, the immense variety and the unbroken continuity of Greek literature in this special volume to mark the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair, where Greece was the Guest of Honour.
READING THE LATE BYZANTINE ROMANCE, 2019
The present paper examines two Byzantine texts from the middle of the thirteenth century, ostensibly unrelated to each other: a political essay written by a young emperor and an anonymous love romance. The analysis is conducted through the concept of hybrid power, a notion initially developed by postcolonial criticism. It is shown that in the two texts authority (that of the Byzantine emperor and that of Eros as emperor) is constructed as hybrid and thus as an impossibility, though in the case of the political essay this impossibility remains unresolved, while in the romance it is actually resolved. The pronounced similarities between the two texts on the level of political ideology (e.g. the notion of friendship between master and servant, the performance of power relations, shared key concepts) informing the hybrid form of authority and its relation to its servants is a clear indication that they belong to the same socio-cultural and intellectual environment, namely the Laskarid imperial court in Nicaea around 1250.
Oxford Art Journal 16 no 1 (1993): 59-74
Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond, 2016
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 2006
Journal of Greek Media & Culture
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1997
Mediaevalia 33, 2012
Continuity, Discontinuities, Ruptures in the Greek World (1204-2014): Economy, Society, History, Literature. Ευρωπαϊκή Εταιρεία Νεοηλληνικών Σπουδών, Αθήνα 2015
The Erotic in Context , 2011
Western Folklore, 2003