ABSTRACT
The name of Adamantios Korais has become almost synonymous with attempts to reform the Modern Greek language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Born in Smyrna in 1748, Korais spent the greater part of his life in Paris, where he died in 1833. Korais prescriptions for the Greek language have to be seen the arbitrary imposition of the self-appointed apostle of the Enlightenment, but as grounded in a conviction of the essential interconnectedness of language, literature and the emergent idea of the nation, which is an essential component of Romanticism. In attempting to formulate, in his own self-taught way, his own version of the emerging Romantic quest for a national language and a national literature, Korais had recourse, not to the classical age or its generic theory, which had already become fossilized by neoclassical conventions, but to the 'new' genre of the novel, and the linguistic practice of its most accomplished practitioners, at the time of the Second Sophistic.
