The twelfth century was a time of cultural renewal and innovation in Byzantium: the long disused genres of epic, satire and the novel (or 'romance') took new forms during that century; at the same time, in language, the vernacular made its first tentative literary appearances. These developments continued uninterruptedly through the late Byzantine

Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, UK

Contents: Preface; Part 1 Literature and Identity: 'De vulgari eloquentia' in 12th-century Byzantium; Antique nation? 'Hellenes' on the eve of Greek independence and in 12th-century Byzantium. Part 2 Byzantine Epic and the Oral Tradition: Balladry in the medieval Greek world; Byzantine historiography and modern Greek oral poetry: the case of Rapsomatis; Was Digenes Akrites an oral poem?; Digenes Akrites and modern Greek folk song: a reassessment; An epic in the making? The early versions of Digenes Akrites. Part 3 The Revival of Satire: Cappadocians at court: Digenes and Timarion; The rhetoric of poverty: the lives and opinions of Theodore Prodromos; Ptochoprodromos III: the ethopoeia of the unruly monk. Part 4 The Byzantine Novel or 'Romance': The Byzantine revival of the ancient novel; The world of fiction and the world 'out there': the case of the Byzantine novel; The poetics of the vernacular Greek romances and the 'chronotope' according to Bakhtin; Courtly romances in Byzantium: a case study in reception; Erotokritos and the history of the novel. Part 5 Byzantine Literature and the Making of a Modern Greek National Consciousness: Koraes, Toynbee and the modern Greek heritage; Romanticism in Greece; La fortune de Digénis Akritis: de l'épopée médiévale au symbole du nationalisme grec; 'Our glorious Byzantinism': Papatzonis, Seferis, and the rehabilitation of Byzantium in postwar Greek poetry; Index.