Roderick Beaton
Biographic Data
| ID | 509237 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Roderick Beaton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Roderick |
| FAMILY NAME | Beaton |
| SIGNATURE | BEATON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0689-0054 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Greek Revolution of 1821: European Contexts, Scottish Connections
Political history and history of ideas, art history, theories of nations and nationalism, Classical Reception studies, modern Greek history and modern Scottish history come together in this collection of essays by experts in all these fields. The starting point for the volume is the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution (1821–1832), for the first time linked to the cultural and intellectual history of Scotland, and particularly of Edinburgh, during…
Byron at Home and Abroad
The chapter gives an account of the places where Byron lived, both in the UK and in mainland Europe, and of the travels he undertook at different points in his life. It also explores the motivation for his many moves, beginning with his early cosmopolitanism and ending with his dedication to the Greek Revolution of the 1820s against the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the ways in which these are reflected in his poetry and correspondence. The fir…
Aphrodite at war: The wartime poetry of Embirikos, Kaknavatos, Papatsonis and Seferis
Petros T. Pizanias, The Making of the Modern Greeks, 1400–1820, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2020. Pp. xiii, 544
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Popular Music of the Greek World: A Note From the Organisers
In May 2019 the British School at Athens hosted an international conference on popular music of the Greek world. The conference aimed to explore and evaluate the diversity of Greek music apparent in the rich variety of local traditions and in the richness of urban popular music both established and emerging, and to examine its causes from broader musical, sociological and artistic perspectives. Rather than focus on particular forms, such as tradi…
Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation
Imagining a Hellenic Republic, 1797–1824: Rigas, Korais, Byron
The ‘New Constitution’ for a Hellenic Republic, published in Vienna by Rigas Velestinlis in 1797, was modelled closely on the French republican constitution of 1793, and envisaged what is now called a ‘civic nation’ based on inclusiveness and the ‘Rights of Man’. Rigas was arrested by the Austrian authorities, handed over to the Ottomans, and executed the following year. The turn from ‘civic’ to ‘ethnic’ nationalism among Greeks in the years lead…
The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896)
The Romantic Construction of Greece
Greece as a modern nation-state is itself a product of European Romanticism. Once revolution broke out in 1821, the conflict was successfully internationalized by mobilizing European ‘romantic’ ideas about ancient Greece, in the service of ‘reviving’ a long-suppressed but latent nation—ideas espoused in different ways by the leading English Romantic poets of the time, P. B. Shelley and Lord Byron. Romanticism as a literary and aesthetic movement …
Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry
Modern Greek Studies since 1975: A personal retrospect
In 1975 interest in contemporary Greece in the UK was at its height. The launch of Byzantine and Modern Studies coincided almost exactly with the ‘Greek Month in London’, when venues all over the city simultaneously hosted a series of cultural and academic events that brought together artists, writers, historians, diplomats, Greeks and philhellenes from many walks of life in a month-long celebration. It was advertised on buses and in the Undergro…
The Making of a Modern Greek Identity: Education, Nationalism, and the Teaching of a Greek National Past
"The Making of a Modern Greek Identity: Education, Nationalism, and the Teaching of a Greek National Past." The European Legacy, 20(2), pp. 184–185
Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution
Roderick Beaton re-examines Lord Byron's life and writing through the long trajectory of his relationship with Greece. Beginning with the poet's youthful travels in 1809–1811, Beaton traces his years of fame in London and self-imposed exile in Italy, that culminated in the decision to devote himself to the cause of Greek independence. Then comes Byron's dramatic self-transformation, while in Cephalonia, from Romantic rebel to 'new statesman', sub…
Nicholas Doumanis, A History of Greece
The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal. This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. T…
Florence Meunier, Le roman byzantin du XII e siècle. A la découverte d’un nouveau monde? Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007, Pp. 325
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Antique nation? ‘Hellenes’ on the eve of Greek independence and in twelfth-century Byzantium
The Hellenic nation, as constituted in the early nineteenth century, is a recent construct; its name and the traditions to which it lays claim are ancient. In the context of modern debates about the antiquity of nations, and particularly the work of Anthony D. Smith, this paper sets out to make a comparative examination of the contexts and semantic field(s) in which the term ‘Hellene’ came to be revived by Greek-speakers, as a term of communal se…
Erotic Pathos, Rhetorical Pleasure: Narrative Technique and Mimesis in Eumathios Makrembolites' "Hysmine & Hysminias" . Ingela Nilsson
Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions . Elizabeth Jeffreys
Seferis and the novel: A reading of Six Nights on the Acropolis
Seferis’s only completed novel makes few concessions to the realist tradition. He was, however, fascinated by the genre and made five attempts to write a novel. Six Nights is a hybrid, transgressive text, which draws on an uncanonical tradition of fiction, from the Odyssey and The Arabian Nights to Gide and Proust. Six Nights can be read as diary-novel, pastiche or parody following Gide, symbolist novel, Bildungsroman , and roman à clef . Close r…
In the Goddess’ Name I Summon You’: Byzantine and Modern (Greek) fortunes of the ancient novel
The prose fiction of the ancient world is the oldest that we possess, and historically marks the founding of the literary genre which, by some indicators at least, has outstripped all others in the European-derived ‘Western’ culture of the last two centuries. Yet even the recent upsurge of interest in the subject, and corresponding upwardly mobile evaluations of it on the part of classical scholars, has focussed on the ancient novel not as a begi…
The Byzantine Revival of the Ancient Novel
It is in the century of the chanson de geste and the earliest Arthurian romances in the West that we first find men of letters in the capital of the eastern empire, Constantinople, trying their hand at literary fiction on the model of the Hellenistic novels. The Byzantine romances of the twelfth century are works of remarkable, and surely deliberate, refinement. Apart from the striking realism of some scenes, and the highly allegorical, imaginati…
The Novel in the Ancient World
This is the second publication in Brill's handbook series The Classical Tradition. The subject of this volume is that group of works of extended prose narrative fiction which bears many similarities to the modern novel and which appeared in the later classical periods in Greece and Rome. The ancient novel has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years not only among students of literature, but also among those looking for new sources on the popul…
An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature: Second Edition Revised and Expanded
This is a readable introduction to the poetry and fiction published in Greek since national independence in 1821. It is the first full-length study to be devoted to the literature of this period, seen as a whole, and including developments up until the present day. The book highlights those writers and works which have enjoyed critical or popular acclaim,and emphasizes the relationships which link one work with another and with its historical con…
Koraes, Toynbee and the modern Greek heritage
At first sight it is nothing more than an accident of history that brings the names of the Greek philologist and patriot Adamandios Koraes and of the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee together: in 1919, Toynbee was appointed to be the first holder of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College in the University of London. The third component of my title introduces some rather more substantia…
The Novel in the Ancient World
This is the second publication in Brill's handbook series The Classical Tradition. The subject of this volume is that group of works of extended prose narrative fiction which bears many similarities to the modern novel and which appeared in the later classical periods in Greece and Rome. The ancient novel has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years not only among students of literature, but also among those looking for new sources on the popul…
Antique nation? ‘Hellenes’ on the eve of Greek independence and in twelfth-century Byzantium
The Hellenic nation, as constituted in the early nineteenth century, is a recent construct; its name and the traditions to which it lays claim are ancient. In the context of modern debates about the antiquity of nations, and particularly the work of Anthony D. Smith, this paper sets out to make a comparative examination of the contexts and semantic field(s) in which the term ‘Hellene’ came to be revived by Greek-speakers, as a term of communal se…
Koraes, Toynbee and the modern Greek heritage
At first sight it is nothing more than an accident of history that brings the names of the Greek philologist and patriot Adamandios Koraes and of the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee together: in 1919, Toynbee was appointed to be the first holder of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College in the University of London. The third component of my title introduces some rather more substantia…
Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in reception
Realism and Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Greek Fiction
‘“Reality”,’ wrote Angelos Terzakis in 1934, ‘is an invention of the nineteenth century’. In saying this Terzakis echoes similar pronouncements of the non- or anti-realist reaction in Europe in the first half of this century, a reaction which, after some vicissitudes, has come to constitute an orthodoxy for much of the modern critical thinking often grouped under the label ‘structuralist’
Dionysios Solomos: The Tree of Poetry
Dionysios Solomos is a poet of contradictions. The fact is not often admitted either by his supporters or his occasional detractors. But there is a puzzling ambiguity about the poet which is only exacerbated by the labels that have been tied round his neck. Solomos, we are told, is one of the European Romantics, he is the father of modern Greek poetry, an epic poet manqué
Dionysios Solomos: The Tree of Poetry
Dionysios Solomos is a poet of contradictions. The fact is not often admitted either by his supporters or his occasional detractors. But there is a puzzling ambiguity about the poet which is only exacerbated by the labels that have been tied round his neck. Solomos, we are told, is one of the European Romantics, he is the father of modern Greek poetry, an epic poet manqué
Folk Poetry of Modern Greece
A wide-ranging study of popular poetry and song in the Greek language from the last years of the Byzantine Empire to the present day. The folk poetry of the title includes the songs, composed and handed down by word of mouth, of unlettered villagers, of wandering minstrels with pretensions to professionalism, and, in more recent times, of the poorer inhabitants of Ottoman and Greek cities. The creative period of this folk poetry covers, at the mi…
Modes and Roads: Factors of Change and Continuity in Greek Musical Tradition
About A.D. 400 the historian Olympiodorus, surveying the contemporary state of culture with a perhaps conventional sigh of nostalgia for a vanished silver age, wrote that “Of the other liberal arts, such as arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, there are a few remains left to our time. But of music even its fame is not known to us. We have books on musical theory but we do not understand them”. Much the same had been said by Aristoxenus some seven …
Was Digenes Akrites an Oral Poem
It is often suggested that Digenes is in some way connected with oral poetry, whether the oral folk poetry of the modern ‘acritic’ ballads or the type of oral epic tradition identified by Milman Parry and A. B. Lord in the Homeric poems and in modern Yugoslavia. Some clarification of the possible role of oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Digenes now seems overdue, and in this paper I propose to examine the texts of the poem in…
Realism and Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Greek Fiction
‘“Reality”,’ wrote Angelos Terzakis in 1934, ‘is an invention of the nineteenth century’. In saying this Terzakis echoes similar pronouncements of the non- or anti-realist reaction in Europe in the first half of this century, a reaction which, after some vicissitudes, has come to constitute an orthodoxy for much of the modern critical thinking often grouped under the label ‘structuralist’
Folk Poetry of Modern Greece
Myth and Text: Readings in the Modern Greek Novel
‘... they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad ... For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well.’ J.L. Borges, ‘Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote’ Mythos is used by Aristotle both in its received sense in his day, meaning a story which need not be literally true but has a special institutional status outside of liter…
Byzantine historiography and modern Greek oral poetry: The case of Rapsomatis
In the ninth book of the Alexiad, Anna Comnene tells the story of the simultaneous revolts against her father Alexios which broke out in Crete and Cyprus in the year 1093. The rising in Crete was shortlived, as the Cretans changed their minds and murdered their leader on hearing the news that the emperor’s fleet was approaching. Of the Cypriot revolt, however, Anna has the following tale to tell: The Cypriots, under their leader Rapsomatis, at fi…
The Rhetoric of Poverty: The Lives and Opinions of Theodore Prodromos
There has been an upsurge of interest recently in the Greek literary revival of the twelfth century that followed upon the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, creating by an accident of history a largely Greek-speaking state out of a former ‘universal’ empire. The leading part played in this revival by the court poet Theodore Prodromos who lived from c. 1100 until perhaps the 1170s, and by works attributed to him, has long been recognised, alt…
Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in reception
Orality and the reception of late Byzantine vernacular literature
The starting point for this paper is the belief that orality has to be understood in a wider sense than is given to the term bv the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. This is the more important when the field of study is medieval or modern Greece, societies far removed from what Walter Ong (1982: 31–75) has termed the ‘primary orality’ of a culture from which writing is absent. The oral formulaic theory, although excellent as …
Koraes, Toynbee and the modern Greek heritage
At first sight it is nothing more than an accident of history that brings the names of the Greek philologist and patriot Adamandios Koraes and of the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee together: in 1919, Toynbee was appointed to be the first holder of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College in the University of London. The third component of my title introduces some rather more substantia…
An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature: Second Edition Revised and Expanded
This is a readable introduction to the poetry and fiction published in Greek since national independence in 1821. It is the first full-length study to be devoted to the literature of this period, seen as a whole, and including developments up until the present day. The book highlights those writers and works which have enjoyed critical or popular acclaim,and emphasizes the relationships which link one work with another and with its historical con…
The Byzantine Revival of the Ancient Novel
It is in the century of the chanson de geste and the earliest Arthurian romances in the West that we first find men of letters in the capital of the eastern empire, Constantinople, trying their hand at literary fiction on the model of the Hellenistic novels. The Byzantine romances of the twelfth century are works of remarkable, and surely deliberate, refinement. Apart from the striking realism of some scenes, and the highly allegorical, imaginati…
The Novel in the Ancient World
This is the second publication in Brill's handbook series The Classical Tradition. The subject of this volume is that group of works of extended prose narrative fiction which bears many similarities to the modern novel and which appeared in the later classical periods in Greece and Rome. The ancient novel has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years not only among students of literature, but also among those looking for new sources on the popul…
In the Goddess’ Name I Summon You’: Byzantine and Modern (Greek) fortunes of the ancient novel
The prose fiction of the ancient world is the oldest that we possess, and historically marks the founding of the literary genre which, by some indicators at least, has outstripped all others in the European-derived ‘Western’ culture of the last two centuries. Yet even the recent upsurge of interest in the subject, and corresponding upwardly mobile evaluations of it on the part of classical scholars, has focussed on the ancient novel not as a begi…
Seferis and the novel: A reading of Six Nights on the Acropolis
Seferis’s only completed novel makes few concessions to the realist tradition. He was, however, fascinated by the genre and made five attempts to write a novel. Six Nights is a hybrid, transgressive text, which draws on an uncanonical tradition of fiction, from the Odyssey and The Arabian Nights to Gide and Proust. Six Nights can be read as diary-novel, pastiche or parody following Gide, symbolist novel, Bildungsroman , and roman à clef . Close r…
Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions . Elizabeth Jeffreys
Erotic Pathos, Rhetorical Pleasure: Narrative Technique and Mimesis in Eumathios Makrembolites' "Hysmine & Hysminias" . Ingela Nilsson
Antique nation? ‘Hellenes’ on the eve of Greek independence and in twelfth-century Byzantium
The Hellenic nation, as constituted in the early nineteenth century, is a recent construct; its name and the traditions to which it lays claim are ancient. In the context of modern debates about the antiquity of nations, and particularly the work of Anthony D. Smith, this paper sets out to make a comparative examination of the contexts and semantic field(s) in which the term ‘Hellene’ came to be revived by Greek-speakers, as a term of communal se…
Florence Meunier, Le roman byzantin du XII e siècle. A la découverte d’un nouveau monde? Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007, Pp. 325
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal. This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. T…
Nicholas Doumanis, A History of Greece
Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution
Roderick Beaton re-examines Lord Byron's life and writing through the long trajectory of his relationship with Greece. Beginning with the poet's youthful travels in 1809–1811, Beaton traces his years of fame in London and self-imposed exile in Italy, that culminated in the decision to devote himself to the cause of Greek independence. Then comes Byron's dramatic self-transformation, while in Cephalonia, from Romantic rebel to 'new statesman', sub…
The Making of a Modern Greek Identity: Education, Nationalism, and the Teaching of a Greek National Past
"The Making of a Modern Greek Identity: Education, Nationalism, and the Teaching of a Greek National Past." The European Legacy, 20(2), pp. 184–185
History (33 works) · Art (30 works) · Literature (26 works) · History (20 works) · Classics (15 works) · Ancient history (13 works) · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies (11 works) · Byzantine Studies and History (10 works) · Classics (10 works) · Poetry (10 works)