@article {26405, title = {""Buried among the ruins": Gissing and the Sorcery of Athens."}, journal = {Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature}, volume = {139}, year = {2021}, pages = {89-99}, abstract = {George Gissing{\textquoteright}s novel\ Sleeping Fires\ (1895) presents a late nineteenth-century Athens that is divided between its ancient and modern identities. As a reflection on the significance of Hellenism in Victorian culture, the novel narrates the random encounter between Edmund Langley, a self-exile with a classical education, and Louis Reed, a passionate and radical young man, who is revealed to be Langley{\textquoteright}s lost and unknown son. In the context of Gissing{\textquoteright}s diaries and letters recording his visit to Athens,\ Sleeping Fires\ portrays the city as an ambivalent space, both inspirational and deceptive. Gissing{\textquoteright}s juxtaposition of the ancient monuments{\textquoteright} beauty with the bleakness of their modern surroundings emphasizes the distance between antiquity and modernity as well as Victorians{\textquoteright} misinterpretations of Greece, revealing the period{\textquoteright}s conflicting discourses about Hellenism.}, url = {doi:10.1353/vct.2021.0007}, author = {Mitsi, Efterpi} }