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Palgrave Macmillan

Witness Literature in Byzantium

Narrating Slaves, Prisoners, and Refugees

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Adam J. Goldwyn

    1. Associate Professor of English, North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA

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  • Explores several key Byzantine texts as witness literature, considering the positionality of authors to the events they describe
  • Considers works by John Kaminiates, Eustathios of Thessaloniki, Niketas Choniates and Anna Komnena
  • Brings Byzantine historiography into dialogue with broader disciplinary considerations of witness literature, trauma and memory studies

Part of the book series: New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture (NABHC)

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Bearing Witness in Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki: Holocaust Literature and the Narration of Byzantine Trauma

    • Adam J. Goldwyn
    Pages 1-70

  3. Prison Literature and Slave Narratives in Byzantium: John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki

    • Adam J. Goldwyn
    Pages 71-140

  4. The Carceral Imaginary in Byzantium: The Komnenian Novels as Holocaust Fiction

    • Adam J. Goldwyn
    Pages 141-229

  5. The Refugee as Historian: Niketas Choniates and the Capture of Constantinople

    • Adam J. Goldwyn
    Pages 231-276

  6. Pleasure, Pain, Perversity: Reading Byzantine Witness Literature After Auschwitz

    • Adam J. Goldwyn
    Pages 277-294

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 295-299
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

“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

 


Authors and Affiliations

  • Associate Professor of English, North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA

    Adam J. Goldwyn

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).

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Witness Literature in Byzantium

  • Book Subtitle: Narrating Slaves, Prisoners, and Refugees

  • Authors: Adam J. Goldwyn

  • Series Title: New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78857-5

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: History, History (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-78856-8Published: 08 August 2021

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-78859-9Published: 09 August 2022

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-78857-5Published: 06 August 2021

  • Series ISSN: 2730-9363

  • Series E-ISSN: 2730-9371

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XVI, 299

  • Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: History of Medieval Europe, Cultural History, Literary History

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