ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Margarita Karapanou’s Kassandra and the Wolf (1974), published in the year of the Greek military junta’s collapse, complicates our traditional understanding of what constitutes political literature. Karapanou’s novel lacks an overt commentary on Greece’s Seven Black Years, and appears to be ostensibly disconnected from its repressive socio-political milieu. However, the novel shows an interest in gender, reworking mythological and folkloric literary figures and having characters shapeshift to explode biological parameters, thereby pushing up against the idea of identity as fixed or immutable. This interest in gender suggests that the novel is actually a response to the junta’s conservative socio-political vision – a vision that publicly venerated traditional gender roles in which there was little room for nonconformity. Adorno's concept of truth content is useful in eliciting the political aspect of Karapanou’s text. Truth content relates to how history is intrinsically embedded within the text. The chapter argues that this profound relationship to history allows the text to inadvertently or unconsciously express a political viewpoint or perspective quite distinct from the author’s obvious intention, or the text’s manifest content, both of which may ostensibly appear politically indifferent.
