Μποβαρισμός, η επιθυμία να είσαι άλλος

In an era dominated by visual culture and its promoted standards, it seems unlikely that a literary text, and one from the 19th century at that, could once have been the screen of our desires. However, the consumer fever, discomfort with provincial life, with marital life itself, the constant dissatisfaction, the desire for escape, for literal or metaphorical journeys, the need for better loves, more beautiful words and dresses—all that Flaubert's heroine, Madame Bovary (1857), embodied, continue to define us today, in a modified or even exactly the same form. We are becoming more followers of others' lives than truly living our own. This is the "desire to be someone else," as Jules de Gaultier (1892) defined this tendency in social psychology. How was this tendency expressed in Modern Greek literature? The present book answers this question, exploring the work of a series of major and minor authors.