Graduate Student, Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies
College of Arts and Law
Thesis Title: Politics, autobiography and narrative experimentation in Greek women’s fiction (1945-2000)
|
Prof. Dimitris Tziovas
|
About
My thesis explores the interrelation between politics, autobiography and narrative experimentation in Greek women’s writing after 1945. In particular, it focuses mainly on the first generation of women writers to emerge shortly after the end of the Second World War (apart from Melpo Axioti who was first published in the 1930s) and attempts to explore how their writings relate to Greece’s the turbulent recent history and the politics of the first post-war decades. The thesis takes the work of four authors (namely Melpo Axioti, Mimika Kranaki, Margarita Lymberaki and Tatiana Gritsi-Milliex) as case studies and discusses them in the wider context of Modern Greek fiction and women’s writing. It is argued that by connecting the political with the autobiographical and by attempting to respond to new literary trends, these authors manage to produce novels which diverged considerably from and challenged mainstream political narratives, especially in the late forties and fifties. Through a combination of politics and formal experimentation, they challenged established ideas and questioned the modes of representation of politics in literature. As a result they were able to articulate quite complex works which went beyond the conventions of the dominant political narratives, especially in the polarized atmosphere of the first few decades after WWII. The thesis also follows these authors’ progress over the years and examines how they made the transition to a more experimental approach to politics through their fiction.
