French travellers to Greece and the representation of modern Greeks in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The representation of modern Greeks by a number of nineteenth-century French travellers raises questions about the factors that influenced them in their accounts. If we accept that travel literature is a distinct kind of literary genre characterized by a range of forms and themes, we should also not ignore the influence of the travellers' social and cultural background on the images they produce. Their social status, gender, cultural and professional backgrounds, together with their personal motives for travel, determine the approach they adopt while observing 'others'. The accounts they produced of numerous aspects of modern Greek life and culture were almost inevitably subjective, often controversial, and reflected intellectual currents and Western preconceptions of that period.