There is something quite refreshing about reading nineteenth-century Greek literature through a twenty-fist century perspective. The historical compactness of Modern Greece, counting no more than two hundred years of existence, seems to have driven the average reader to equate the nineteenth century with a state of literary archaism. Nineteenth-century texts are commonly separated from the modern and from modernism: in the minds of most readers modernism is identified with the generation of the 1930s. And yet, despite their archaic language, a surprising number of nineteenth-century texts display modern sensibilities in terms of style, narrative construction and ideology. Books such as Georgia Pateridou's are particularly welcome because they make the literary nineteenth-century seem relevant.

Pateridou's study brings together five bulwarks of nineteenth-century Greek fiction, Vizyenos, Psycharis, Eftaliotis, Karkavitsas and Papadiamandis, discussing their work in relation to the concept of place. To our postmodern minds, place is more than just location: it is a compound notion blending identity, community, language, fluidity and dislocation. Pateridou confidently explores the dynamics of such notions, in careful close-readings of a small selection of texts by each author. Her title «για νάρθω σ’ άλλη ξενιτειά» refers to Papadiamandis's short story «Ο Αμερικάνος», where a Greek expat returns from the United States only to find himself alienated anew. The story has a happy ending, but the quote nevertheless becomes a catchphrase that aptly describes ‘place’ as a problem: travelling and emigration, driven by a number of reasons, whether economic recession, the need to develop the self or simple curiosity, disrupt the individual's sense of homeland, community and belonging.

Such a cluster of nuances associated with the notion of place calls for a rich, extended introduction. What discursive means (other than their direct experiences) did these authors have at their disposal for the understanding of travelling, emigration and ‘ξενιτειά’? (For example, demotic songs on the subject may have played an integral part). How did they travel and how did this affect their perceptions of place? How have ideas on homeland and dislocation been moderated in the shift from modernity to post-modernity? Pateridou's introduction offers a ‘teaser’ that hints at these questions rather than directly posing them. She writes, ‘a place can be hospitable, pleasant, productive; it can inspire its inhabitants or oppose their aspirations; it can appear as a prohibitive construction’ (p. 15). It is true that place is not just one thing, that it can only be described in its multiplicity of different functions. However, such an understanding of place treats it as entirely disconnected from people, and it is people that are primarily under discussion here. It would also have been useful to compare and contrast ways in which the generation of the 1880s perceived place with how it was perceived by earlier and later generations.

Despite the cursory introduction, Pateridou usefully focuses throughout the book on problematic identity formations, always identifying the heart of the problem as a sort of friction, an unresolved tension between two opposing affiliations. In Vizyenos, whom Pateridou examines in the first chapter from a cultural studies perspective, it is the oscillation between the East, identified with home, and the West, as an (unattainable) ideal. Pateridou is referring to Edward Said's thoughts on exile and Du Bois's concept of ‘double consciousness’. Du Bois defined ‘double consciousness’ as looking at the self through someone else's expectations. Through a close-reading of Vizyenos's short stories «Αι συνέπειαι της παλαιάς ιστορίας» and «Μοσκώβ Σελήμ» (although the discussion of the latter is thinner in comparison) Pateridou makes clear that identity is a kaleidoscopic formation, related reversibly to the place in which one finds oneself. In Germany, the Greek characters of «Αι συνέπειαι» are defined by what they believe Greece to be, but it is their German surroundings that dictate these beliefs.

Psycharis's Το ταξίδι μου, discussed in Pateridou's second chapter, is not just a linguistic manifesto for demoticism. It is a complex text, both linguistically and generically, which displays Psycharis's double loyalties: to France and Greece, to centre and periphery, to a culturally hegemonic metropolis and its colony. Looking out from his established position in France, Psycharis wished to see Greece assuming the intellectual responsibility of a European state. The means by which he explored this wish amounted to a kind of ‘crypto-colonialism’, on Michael Herzfeld's definition of the term. Without mentioning ‘crypto-colonialism’, or colonialism for that matter, Pateridou engages in an interesting discussion of the terms of cultural difference, as expressed through the language question.

In contrast to Psycharis, Argyris Eftaliotis was attached solely to a Greek idea. Pateridou begins her third, and perhaps most accomplished chapter, by aptly summarizing three critical stances towards his work: one that saw Eftaliotis as a staunch defender of Greekness who denied any sense of foreignness; another that saw his writing as primarily spurred by nostalgia, and a third that primarily identified the imaginary (re)construction of a desired place in his work (p. 100). Pateridou regards Eftaliotis as the archetypal diasporic subject: born in Mytilini, but living most of his adult life in Liverpool, where he was a successful merchant, Eftaliotis consumed himself in imagining Greece from a distance. She discusses his novel Μανόλης ο Νελμπεντέρης as tainted by the objectives of a diaspora community, to which it was primarily addressed. ‘If the solution for the diasporic subject is the connection of the different selves into a more coherent unit, which will differentiate itself from the previous ones after having absorbed them [. . .], then the central character (like the author) has hardly touched it’ (p. 124) my translation. It is precisely this friction between the imaginary, idealized homeland and the reality of British life that animates Eftaliotis's stories. Pateridou correctly defines a diaspora community as the ‘place in between’.

If the tension between the reality of a foreign place and an imaginary homeland is obvious in Eftaliotis, an altogether different kind of tension is to be identified in Karkavitsas’ «Ο ζητιάνος». Pateridou reads Karkavitsas’ naturalist text as a novel of place that distinguishes itself from the technical advances and the progress of the ‘Western’ world, to which Greece aspired to belong. Both (fictional) villages featured in the novel, Krakoura, where the beggar received his evil training in begging and manipulation, and Nychteremi, with its naive inhabintants, so easily led astray and fooled, are constantly contrasted with a virtual place (a city perhaps?) that would function in the advanced ways of science and progress. Pateridou's reading is particularly effective regarding the ways in which the perspective of an omniscient narrator functions as a ‘panopticon’ that exposes the shortcomings of these villages. Reading place against the failed grand national narratives of the 1890s, the defeat in the war of 1897 and the bankruptcy of 1893, Pateridou illuminates the detailed effort Karkavitsas has made in displaying the workings of a small community.

In contrast to the preceding case studies of prose authors whose narrative output is more or less compact, Papadiamandis poses a problem for Pateridou, in that the majority of his texts deal with place. Which should one single out? The problem may be reflected in an introducution, which, compared to the mood of the rest of the book, may be too general. She finds her stride in the analysis of the short stories, «Ο Αμερικάνος» and «Ο ρεμβασμός του Δεκαπενταύγουστου»: both stories shed light on Papadiamandis's conception of ‘home’ as the blending of place, particularly the natural landscape, community and tradition, and the terms on which home-coming can be achieved.

Pateridou's readings offer a fresh approach to these texts. She correctly identifies key issues in each author, and these issues are dealt with in a succession that can be said to offer a narrative of place in its own terms: otherness for Vizyenos, hegemony for Psycharis, diaspora for Eftaliotis, community for Karkavitsas and home-coming for Papadiamandis. Some ideas discussed in the book, particularly the exact terms of the friction between East and West, may need a bit of fine-tuning. However, Pateridou's book shows what direction the discussion of older texts should take in the future. It offers an exciting perspective, theoretically informed and inquisitive, which, it is to be hoped, will find imitators.