“It Never Entered into My Head That You Were Going to Annex Any Romaic Specimens to Your Poem”: , , and the Politicization of Greek Language, Literature, and Learning (original) (raw)

2018, British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation

When university friends Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse traveled together to Ottoman Greece as part of their Grand Tour from 1809 to 1811 (Hobhouse left in July 1810; Byron extended his stay until April 1811), they joined an influx of Britons traveling to, and writing about, the Levantine area. In fact, in the century preceding Byron and Hobhouse's journey to Greece, the country (officially an Ottoman territory until 1832) was in the process of being "rediscovered" by Western travelers. As Bernard Herbert Stern details in The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature 1732-1786, a transition occurred in the eighteenth century wherein Europe's engagement with (primarily Ancient) Greece shifted from a relationship that was exclusively textual to one that included an interest in the material realities of the country, and thus a desire to visit the land. As Stern writes, "[t]he neo-classical attitude toward the antique, with its principles of formalism, moralism, and imitation, is transformed into an attitude equally admiring, but with the different principles of primitivism, symbolism, and individualism. The interest in the antique turns away from books and authority, textual or academic study, to exploration, archaeology, and travel" (4). In England,