Guarding the wild: A placed critical inquiry into literary culture in modern nations (Greece)

Scholars in humanistic disciplines have been focusing on “place” in response to issues like environmental degradation and globalization. Literary ecocritics have undertaken place-centered studies in order to address issues important to local communities and ecological sustainability. Such projects, however, have not considered important assumptions about place (and their consequences) inherent in the historically constituted category of “literature” itself. This dissertation addresses this issue by developing a historically grounded place-based theory of literary critical interpretation and by demonstrating its practice.; I begin developing theory by drawing on humanistic geography for an adequate theory of place in social and ecological terms. I engage with literary and folkloric research demonstrating that modern literary categories, critical practices, and assumptions have their roots in, and continue to reflect the concerns of, projects dealing with national identity. My goal is to develop a perspective capable of analyzing simultaneously, and in relation to each other, canonical national literature and widely ignored local literatures hitherto categorized as “mere folklore.”; In order to put theory into practice, and to continue developing and refining the theory, I then turn to critical interpretation of texts relevant to one particular place: Crete. Utilizing techniques from literary criticism and folklore (by viewing oral poetry in context as performance), I examine Greek novels together with Cretan oral poetry. I analyze how these texts refer to, and compete with, one another regarding such issues as modernization, preservation of local traditions, local wilderness conservation, and local agriculture. The climax of this analysis focuses on oral poetry collected ethnographically in Crete. I argue that it promotes an explicitly ecological ethic of the wild that strives to synthesize “the best” of modernity and local folk traditions.; The significance of this research is that it will contribute a historically grounded, theoretically-argued framework for treating social and ecological issues to literary critics, folklorists, and other humanists concerned with the social and ecological well-being of local communities. In addition, my examination of the Greek case will provide concrete examples of how local literary practices, often considered unimportant or uninteresting, can, in fact, become important vehicles for debate on such issues.