Greek Post-Symbolist poetics

Thesis

This thesis explores the poetics of the Greek Post-Symbolists, a group of early twentieth-century poets whose main period of activity falls in the years between the Generation of the 1880s and that of the 1930s.

By focussing on Post-Symbolist concepts of the role of poetry and on the way in which Post-Symbolist poems are constructed, this thesis examines the poetic system of a group of poets who occupy a transitional period in the history of Modern Greek literature.

The Post-Symbolists question both the nationalism of poets of the Generation of the 1880s and their own place in society. Post-Symbolist poetry focuses on themes related to the interior landscape of the individual. It promotes negation and absence, de-emphasizes external reality, foregrounding a poetic reality created through the acoustic links between words, and it undermines the importance previously attached to metre and rhythm in poetry.

In this way Post-Symbolist poetic language constitutes a reaction against the dominant poetic discourse of the time, and a turning-point in twentieth-century Greek poetry.

This thesis explores both the internal structure of Post-Symbolist poetry and the relationship between Post-Symbolism on the one hand and the discourses of the Generation of the 1880s and of the Generation of the 1930s on the other, placing this in the historical, socio-political and ideological context of time.

Authors: Philokyprou, E

• Publication date: 2009
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: absence; symbolism; poetics
• Subjects: Literatures of other languages