Letters from E. M. Edmonds to Nikolaos G. Politis

Abstract

This article presents the letters sent by the late nineteenth-century English writer Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds to the Greek folklorist Nikolaos G. Politis. While a preoccupation with folklore and ethnology predisposed the Victorian public to take a narrow view of Greek society, Edmonds's interest in both vernacular culture and the literary, social and political life of modern Greece enriched the complex cultural exchange that developed between European (Neo)Hellenists and Greek scholars. This European-wide discourse promoted modern Greece as an autonomous subject of study, worthy of intellectual pursuit.