Reviewed by: The cultural poetics of Greek prose fiction: From hermeneutics to ethics by Dimitris Tziovas Eleni Papargyriou (bio) Dimitris Tziovas (Δημήτρης Tζιόβας), Η πολιτισμική ποιητική της ελληνικής πεζογραφίας. Από την ερμηνεία στην ηθική [The cultural poetics of Greek prose fiction: From hermeneutics to ethics]. Heraklion: University of Crete Press, 2017. Pp. xvii + 589. Paper €20.00. Since the late 1980s, Dimitris Tziovas has been one of the main scholars to shape the field of modern Greek literary studies in the UK and beyond. His academic career spans more than three decades, during which he has contributed several important books and articles highlighting critical moments in Greek literary history. The present book collects some of his essays on Greek prose fiction, produced from the mid 1990s through 2015. This is not a collection of miscellaneous essays: Tziovas subsumes them, lightly revised and updated, under the umbrella of cultural poetics; in this sense, the volume can be perceived as a concept anthology (previously, Roderick Beaton collected his essays on Greek literature under the overarching theme of the nation in his 2015 volume The Idea of the Nation in Greek Literature). Cultural poetics is not new terrain for Tziovas, who in a sense has been working on this subject for most of his academic career. Linked to new historicism, cultural poetics examines texts within a broader field of cultural [End Page 473] production, prioritizing ideas over narratological tropes, the historical, social, and political zeitgeist over a rigid and watertight history of genres, and an ethics of reading over hermeneutics. Perhaps not all the essays in this volume were written specifically with this concept in mind. However, they all contribute to a reading of literary texts that inquires into their position within what Bourdieu would call "a field of cultural production" rather than into their status as aesthetic monuments or pillars of a national canon. Tziovas's volume could be read as a cultural history of Greek prose fiction from the early 1800s to the present day. The twenty chapters are integrated within eight broader sections spanning the period from the emergence of the modern Greek novel in the 1830s to developments in Greek literature since 1974. Between these two endpoints are sections dealing with ethografia, modernism, the generation of the 1930s, and postwar fiction produced in Greece and Cyprus. Tziovas extensively discusses Kazantzakis (in three chapters) and two authors, George Theotokas and M. Karagatsis, who were central in defining interwar urban realism. He then moves on to the postwar years, examining the work of Vassilis Vassilikos and Dimitris Chatzis. The book ends with an overview of post-dictatorship prose fiction in which Tziovas identifies centrifugal tendencies from the 1980s onward (chapter 19), as well as a topical discussion on reinstating (or reclaiming) ethics in literary criticism (chapter 20). Tziovas sees literary trends and genres as constantly shifting, perpetually in flux, and perhaps not so easily definable and measurable as histories of literature want them to be. Within this context of fluidity, he reassesses established terms which he regards as being in transition and perhaps even as overflowing, in disconcerting ways, the rigid boundaries established for them by previous critical traditions. One case in point is his discussion (in chapter 5) of ethografia, the late nineteenth-century depiction of mores and customs that marked the passage from romanticism to realism. Formerly, scholarly attention was focused on the distinction between an idyllic version of ethografia that takes place in the countryside and a realistic one which unfolds in urban environments. Tziovas proposes to collapse this distinction entirely: ethografia, he argues, is in fact a compromise between these two tendencies, a transition from the agricultural mode of life to an urban and, in a sense, modern mentality. Those authors who excelled at it, such as Karkavitsas (whom Tziovas uses as a primary example) were struggling to make sense of a rapidly-shifting world and a new nation that was striving to define itself. Tziovas seems to argue that the study of Greek literary history has hitherto been characterized by meticulous efforts to categorize and classify works without regard for their context within cultural production generally. Such criticism [End Page 474] has treated literature in a vacuum as a mere succession of literary generations, an accumulation of genres...
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