The prose of Thanassis Valtinos: Postmodernism and the historiographical issue

No abstractValtinos (1932- ) is one of the most controversial authors of the post-war period whose prose has more than once challenged narrative conventions in fiction and dominant views on Greek history, politics and culture. Commentators have maintained an ambiguous attitude towards his writings whose underlying causes have not been sufficiently explored to date but they are related to issues of literary aesthetics and interpretations of recent events in contemporary historiography. Since the first publication of his The descent of the nine (1963), Valtinos intervened dynamically in both fields of literary aesthetics and historiographical discourse. The author continued to intervene in a similar fashion after 1974, but the ideological concerns arising from a close reading of his works remain largely unexplored to date. In this paper I argue, that a less biased interpretation of the author's works and their correlation with postmodernist concerns has been largely deferred locally by the ideological climate of ’70s and ’80s populism, by the gradual domination of leftist historiography, and by the local critical establishment which has been more than reticent in its assimilation and implementation of postmodernist methods in the critical reading of literary prose