From antiheroes to new realism: French and Italian crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century

Abstract

ABSTRACTCrime fiction has been constantly present in Greek popular culture, mainly through translations published in newspapers, magazines and in book form, from the nineteenth century to the present day. While the Anglo-American influence on the development of Greek popular literature as a whole has undoubtedly been paramount since the beginning of the twentieth century, other national traditions have also played an important role. In this article, I provide an overview of cultural transfers between Greek, and French and Italian crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century, taking into account the major influence of French culture and literature in Greece since the Enlightenment, and the common emergence of a new French and Italian crime fiction in translation after the 1990s. In particular, I look at the interplay between translated crime fiction and indigenous Greek texts, focusing on the emergence and consecration of the genre in relation to key texts, agents and events. Drawing on a definition of translation as rewriting, I examine interlingual, as well as intersemiotic practices, showing how the history of the genre in Greece has been (re)written through translation.