Literary outlooks on Greek women’s captivity: Polish philhellenic literature in European contexts
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Literary outlooks on Greek women’s captivity: Polish philhellenic literature in European contexts
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Date
13 November 2021
Abstract
At the time of the outbreak of the 1821 Greek Revolution, Poland was partitioned by three neighbouring states. As a result, freedom, the first part of the famous alternative on the revolutionary banner “Freedom or Death”, was often understood in Poland in political and cultural terms: as state sovereignty or as the individual liberty of noble men. However, when Polish literature of the time speaks about Greek women, the kind of freedom at stake in of the war is often the lack of indirect coercion, which usually means freedom from service to the enemy and from sexual violence. Speaking more generally, this distinction between male and female freedom is visible in other European philhellenic works. Starting from this point, the talk discusses the representation of women captured by the enemy in literature on the Greek Revolution. It asks about the political meanings of those images, their sources, and the employed conventions. The questions addressed specifically to the Polish literature would be: (1) to what degree is the old-Polish theme of Ottoman slavery (“jasyr”) used in philhellenism, and (2) can the latest debates on the serfdom of Polish peasants shed some new light on the images of Ottoman captivity. The talk focuses on Polish romantic poetry, mainly of Józef Dunin-Borkowski (1809–1843), while works of other Polish romantics (Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński) and European philhellenes will be employed as context.
(Edited abstract from conference website)
(Edited abstract from conference website)
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https://dimensionsof1821.com/abstracts/#e-janio
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00:20:00
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All Rights Reserved
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