Roderick Beaton

Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, a post he has held since 1988. He has written widely on Greek literature and culture from the twelfth century to the present. His books include "An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature" (2nd edition 1999, also published in Greek as «Εισαγωγή στη νεότερη ελληνική λογοτεχνία»), the award-winning biography "George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel" (2003), and the novel "Ariadne’s Children" (1995), both also translated into Greek. He has published translations from Modern Greek verse and fiction, including works by Embirikos, Seferis, Solomos, and the novel "Fool’s Gold" by Maro Douka. His edition and translation of "A Levant Journal" by George Seferis (published by Ibis Editions, Jerusalem) was awarded the Hellenic Foundation for Culture Prize for Translation in 2008. His most recent books are «Ο Καζαντζάκης μοντερνιστής και μεταμοντέρνος» (co-edited with David Ricks) and "The Making of Modern Greece: Romanticism, Nationalism and the Uses of the Past, 1797-1896", both published in 2009.

For the period October 2009 to September 2012 he has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Fellowship to work on his current project, a monograph provisionally entitled "Byron’s War: The Greek Revolution and the English Romantic Imagination". During the last three months of 2010 he is Visiting Fellow at the British School at Athens.

Selected publications:

AUTHORED BOOKS

- Folk poetry of modern Greece. Cambridge University Press, 1980, 229 pp., paperback reissue, 2004
- The medieval Greek romance. Cambridge University Press, 1989, 261 pp.; 2nd ed., revised and expanded: London: Routledge, 1996, 301 pp. Greek translation: Αθήνα: Καρδαμίτσας, 1996; Italian translation: Rubbettino, 1997
- An introduction to modern Greek literature. Oxford University Press, 1994, 426 pp. Greek translation, revised and slightly expanded: Αθήνα: Νεφέλη, 1996; paperback edition, revised and updated: Oxford UP, 1999, 420 pp.
- George Seferis: Waiting for the angel. A biography. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 (512 pp.); Greek translation: Αθήνα: Ωκεανίδα, 2003
- From Byzantium to Modern Greece: Medieval literature and its modern reception, Aldershot: Variorum (Reprints series), 2008
- Ο Καζαντζάκης μοντερνιστής και μεταμοντέρνος [Kazantzakis as a modernist and postmodernist]. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης, 2009, 203 pp.

EDITED BOOKS

- "The Greek novel, A.D. 1 - 1985". Croom Helm, London 1988, 229 pp.
- (with Charlotte Roueché) "The making of Byzantine history: Studies dedicated to Donald M. Nicol". Publications of the Center for Hellenic Studies (KCL), no. 1. Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 1993, xxviii + 200 pp.
- (with David Ricks) "Digenes Akrites: New approaches to Byzantine heroic poetry". Publications of the Center for Hellenic Studies (KCL), no. 2. Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 1993, xi + 196 pp.
- (with David Ricks) "The making of Modern Greece: Romanticism, nationalism and the uses of the past". Farnham: Ashgate (2009)

RECENT ARTICLES

- "Nikos Kazantzakis, creator of Zorba and The Last Temptation of Christ, fifty years on." TLS no. 5438 (22 June, 2007) 11-13
- «Ο Ερωτόκριτος στο έργο και στη ζωή του Γιώργου Σεφέρη» ["Erotokritos in the life and work of G. Seferis"], Παλίμψηστο (Βικελαία Δημοτική Βιβλιοθήκη, Ηράκλειο) 20/21 (2006-7 [published April 2008], 51-66
- "Obermann of Troy", in Arion 16/1 (2008), 111-16
- "Kazantzakis the Cretan: versions of the Minoan past from the author of Zorba the Greek." Kampos: Cambridge Studies in Modern Greek 16 (2008), 1-23
- "Modernism and the quest for national identity: the case of Ritsos’ Romiosini", in Διεθνές Συνέδριο: Ο ποιητής και ο πολίτης Γιάννη Ρίτσος [International Symposium: The poet and the citizen Yannis Ritsos]. Αθήνα: Μουσείο Μπενάκη/Εκδόσεις Κέδρος, 2009, pp. 109-124
- "Korais and the Second Sophistic: The Hellenistic novel as paradigm for a modern literary language," in A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk (eds), Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 341-53
- "Historical poetics: chronotopes in Leucippe and Clitophon and Tom Jones," in Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, et al. (eds), Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope. Reflections, Applications, Perspectives. Ghent: Academia 2010, pp. 59-76

FICTION

- "Ariadne’s Children". Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London 1995), 372 pp. (Phoenix paperback, London 1996; St Martin’s Press, New York 1997; Sammleren, Copenhagen 1997 [Danish]; Καστανιώτης, Αθήνα 1999 [Greek])

TRANSLATIONS

- Maro Douka, "Fool’s Gold" [«Η αρχαία σκουριά», 1979]. Κέδρος, Αθήνα 1991, 312 pp.
- Dionysios Solomos, "'The Cretan’ and ‘Carmen Saeculare’" in P. Mackridge (ed.), D. Solomos: The Free Besieged and Other Poems (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2000), pp. 1-9; 91-3
- George Seferis, "‘Love’s Discourse’" [introduction and translation]. Modern Poetry in Translation 21 (2003) 149-53
- George Seferis: "A Levant Journal", ed. and trans., with introduction and notes. Jerusalem: Ibis, 2007, 169 pp.