ABSTRACT
This chapter examines modern Greek prose literary texts dating from the early 19th century to the end of the late 1930s. In the era of the Enlightenment, the ‘Greek genius’ was organically connected with the discourse of the French Enlightenment and aimed at serving educational ends. With the onset of the Romantic age, which roughly coincided with Greek independence, the role of the genius shifted, bringing to the fore the image of the male warrior by means of the national-romantic historical novel; its demonic version is linked with (few) cases of disputed gender stereotypes or anti-national erotic desires. The enterprising genius, underlined by the advent of diaspora Greeks to the urbanised capital, particularly after 1880, was represented in realistic, naturalistic and satirical ways. Finally, interwar urban realistic novels blended the genius with the exuberance of the chosen artist on the one hand and, on the other, gave it racialist, historicist and nationalist undertones, as part of a quest for the hidden essence of Hellenicity.
