In June 2014 a conference was held in Selwyn College, Cambridge, to honour the retirement of David Holton, Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature. The papers presented covered aspects of Cretan literature, language and social history from the late Venetian era to the twentieth century, beginning and ending with two landmark writers, Kornaros and Kazantzakis. But the volume of conference proceedings provides even more than its title promises. It discusses writers from Chortatsis (late sixteenth century) to Galanaki (early twenty-first century), offering scholars a broader spectrum of topics than they might have expected. To divide this heterogeneous material into distinct sections was not a simple matter; the titles of Parts IV (‘Social and linguistic aspects in historical perspective’) and V (‘Crete and… beyond’) were cleverly designed to group together a wide variety of contributions.
Producing such a book is a demanding task, and Giannakopoulou and Skordyles show themselves to be professional, knowledgeable and painstaking editors. However, there are minor problems that could have been addressed. A closer look at the bibliographies of the papers would have obviated inconsistencies in references to the same book (i.e. to the volume Ζητήματα νεοελληνικής φιλολογίας, on pp. 65 and 148). Also, more careful crosschecking of the abstracts and titles against the actual texts submitted for publication would have prevented some contradictions. Thus Michael Paschalis's paper on ‘The evolution of authorial self-consciousness in Cretan and Heptanesian literature’ as printed in the volume (as opposed to the version on academia.edu) does not correspond to the preceding abstract or the title as it appears in the Contents.
The volume opens with a helpful Introduction by the editors, in which they provide background on Cretan history and culture, and discuss each paper with reference to its contribution to current research. Following this, Part I deals with David Holton's favorite subject, the area in which he has produced most of his influential papers: Cretan Renaissance literature. Marina Rodosthenous-Balafa discusses two literary works (the Cypriot Canzoniere and Chortatsis's Panoria) that she has systematically studied in the past, focusing now on their differing responses to Petrarchism. Nikola Kakkufa in his extensive paper analyses the dreams of Charidimos and Aretousa in Erotokritos, thus foregrounding what these two main characters have in common. Paschalis's brief contribution, mentioned above, returns to an interesting topic that he has treated in an earlier, Greek-language article.
Scholarship on Kazantzakis is represented by two papers, in the second part of the book. Afrodite Athanassopoulou takes a close and objective look at the author's travel writing on England, while Elena González-Vaquerizo returns to her favorite subject, Kazantzakis's Odyssey, and discusses its modernist and Cretan aspects; it is a pity though that she sometimes omits bibliographical references for the opinions of other scholars to which she refers (the editors could have insisted on this).
Part III, ‘Crete as a Topos and a Lieu de Mémoire’, opens with Kristina Gedgaudaitė ’s careful study of the notion of identity in Maro Douka's The Innocent and the Guilty; however, her bibliography is brief and should have included at least Mary Miké’s paper on the same book (2008) as well as Lizy Tsirimokou's influential essay on City in Literature (1988), since the role played by the city of Chania in Douka's novel is discussed in this paper. Georgia Pateridou compares two recent novels by Rea Galanaki, focusing on Mount Psiloritis as a long-lasting symbol in Cretan literature, especially of the Venetian era.
Part IV brings together four papers on Cretan linguistics, history and travel writing. Peter Mackridge describes R. M. Dawkin's incomplete book on Crete, in a paper richly illustrated with photos and sketches. Research in the State Archives of Venice is represented by Maria Mondelou's contribution on illegitimate children in sixteenth-century Sitia, while Giannis Skalidakis discusses forced labour and social resistance in occupied Crete, 1941–1945. Io Manolessou's paper on two features of Cretan dialect is effectively a tribute to Holton's major project, the Grammar of Medieval Greek.
In Part IV Caterina Carpinato's vividly written contribution, takes us on a walking tour through Venice, highlighting both the material and the intangible heritage of Crete in the city, with a wealth of information and many unexpected connections. David Ricks suggests a new reading of Solomos's famous dramatic monologue The Cretan ‘through and against’ Robert Browning's poem ‘The Italian in England’. Finally, the contributions of Lilia Diamantopoulou and Stathis Gauntlett close the volume by returning to key texts of the Cretan Renaissance, although by different routes: they discuss, respectively, adaptations of Cretan works in the form of comics and the exaltation of orality over written culture. It is a pity, though, that Gauntlett reproduces outdated views (e.g. that the poet Sachlikis belongs to the sixteenth century), long superseded by recent, reliable scholarship.
Despite some problems in matters of detail, the volume is a useful presentation of the present state of Cretan studies. Moreover, it contains a wealth of photographic material illustrating, where appropriate, the content of some papers (Kakkoufa, Mackridge, Carpinato and Diamantopoulou); and it is attractively produced in hardback by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, with a beautiful front cover.
Last but not least, we should mention the contribution of the scholar honoured in this volume: with his subtle sense of humour, David Holton welcomed the conference participants with a fifty-line poem in Greek, recalling the fifteen- and seventeen-syllable iambic lines of the two key writers mentioned in the title. By including it at the very beginning, the editors convey a sense of the cheerful atmosphere of the conference, something that is usually lost in published conference proceedings.
