ABSTRACT

The exploration of playful modalities offered a grid for examining play in the Greek paradigm. But one needs to refine the broad aesthetic and historical concerns expressed within this grid, such as modernist obscurity, literary agonistics and the poetics of randomness, taking into account the dynamics within a much narrower, national context. Dimitris Tziovas notes that the novel of Athenian writers such as George Theotokas, Angelos Terzakis and others had more affinities with the nineteenth-century urban novel rather than with its modernist version. Innovation in prose fiction often came from unexpected directions, not so much as an attempt to keep abreast with literary developments abroad, but as a reaction to the national intellectual project of the 1930s. Tziovas has argued that the divide between high and low, which others saw as the crucial premise for a national modernism, effectively translates in Greek terms into a distinction between public and private.