Rosa Mucignat and David Ricks, ‘The Revolution and the Romantic Imagination: Echoes in European Literature’, in: Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas (ed.), The Greek Revolution. A Critical Dictionary (Cambridge MA, 2021).

Rosa Mucignat and David Ricks contributed to the Critical Dictionary of the Greek Revolution that appeared at the occasion of the Revolution's bicentennial.

The cultural movement known as philhellenism has been recognized as an unprecedented example of the power of public opinion to influence government policies even in the delicate area of foreign relations. Throughout Europe, literature about (and, less often, from) Greece played an important role in inspiring a transnational solidarity movement that made substantial contributions to the cause of Greek independence (Bass 2008, 47–151). Most of this literature is now forgotten, and modern readers are likely to find fault with the often sentimental, moralizing, and derivative efforts of literary-inclined philhellenes. However, some of their writings are still worth reading for more than historical reasons. Most importantly, this material as a whole deserves to be reassessed not only as subsidiary evidence in the historiography of the Greek Revolution, but also as original expression of a key moment in European culture when relations between aesthetics, public discourse, and politics were being redefined.