Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

July – December 2020

Epiphanios-Stephanos Dimitriadis (1760-1827) and the Literature of the Modern Greek Enlightenment

Markos Xydakis' project at EXC 2020 will focus on the literary production of Epiphanios-Stephanos Dimitriadis (1760-1827), an intellectual in the years preceding the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), a period generally known as Modern Greek Enlightenment. As the translator of significant French (Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Delisle de Sales) and Spanish (Baltasar Gracián) writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and author of a considerable amount of original texts (a comedy, a tragedy, a multi-character dialogue and a novella), Dimitriadis provides the opportunity to examine the philosophical and ideological debate of his period from a literary perspective. The current project will take into account the new theoretical and methodological approach to literature adopted by the Cluster’s programme and will examine the literary production of the long eighteenth century and the ways in which it was both the stage and the subject of extended debate and controversy. The Cluster’s programme will offer a new approach to a community which wavered between modernism and conservatism; an investigation of this community will provide valuable insights into the ways in which an individual, or a group of intellectuals, can indeed belong to different communities at the same time.

Markos Xydakis has been a PhD student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens since 2018. He has received two scholarships from the Melina Mercouri Foundation and the Greek State Scholarship Foundation for his work on his thesis. His research interests focus on the literary production of the period of the Modern Greek Enlightenment.