Witness Literature in Byzantium: Narrating Slaves, Prisoners, and Refugees

by Adam J. Goldwyn

Overview

This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts – John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates’ History (ca. 1204–17) – and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors’ positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030788575
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	08/06/2021
Series:	New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	668 KB

About the Author

Adam J. Goldwyn is Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University. He is the co-editor of Mediterranean Modernism: Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Table of Contents

1. Bearing Witness in Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki: Holocaust Literature and the Narration of Trauma in Byzantium.- 2. Prison Literature and Slave Narratives in Byzantium: John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki.- 3. The Carceral Imaginary in Byzantium: The Komnenian Novels as Holocaust Fiction.- 4. The Refugee as Historian: Niketas Choniates and the Capture of Constantinople.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“By turns reflexive and daring, Goldwyn's book is riskful thinking at its best. For medievalists, it opens up new possibilities for reading and teaching the works that matter to us most — those that somehow place us face-to-face with human Others and leave us feeling more than we can express. In Goldwyn's book, the face of the human Other presents itself, even if only briefly and in a moment of mortal danger.”

— Vincent Barletta, Stanford University, USA

“Innovative, illuminating and daring. This theoretically sophisticated book revolutionizes the study of Byzantine literature and enriches our understanding of angst, anxiety and trauma in the middle ages. This book provides an insightful discussion of captivity in the Byzantine era and a new interdisciplinary, trans-historical understanding of narratives which will captivate scholars for years to come.”

—Elena N. Boeck, DePaul University, USA