The book includes 33 studies by older and newer neohellenists, academics and critics, which constitute an alternative, multifaceted and historically oriented view of Greek literature in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on literary creation and its relationships with European literature, historiography, and criticism as shapers of literary perceptions. At the same time, it examines the work that served as the initial stimulus: the eight-volume "History of Modern Greek Literature" by Alexandros Argyriou, to whose memory a conference was dedicated in May 2011 at the University of Crete, from which this volume emerged.

The recent literary past, the 20th century, is more difficult to narrate than the distant past precisely because it is more alive, more diverse. However, it offers a privileged field to test new reflections. The book aims to provoke stimuli, to highlight issues, and not to close chapters. How is a history of literature written today? "History" is not only the narration of what happened, nor is it simply chronological classification. It must be a search for sequence (where does it exist? where does it not?), a consideration of function (what does presence declare, what does absence declare?), which realizes that it cannot be final, it will always be partial, but perhaps for this reason it achieves fruitful penetrations, illuminating each time some more hidden, more revealing aspects of the effects that literature has on readers.