Paper short abstract:

The period 1890-1920 acquries transitional character.Instability, fluidity, disorder, compose its "hybrid" identity.The aim of the paper is to comprehend the ways that the historical subjects handle imaginatively the ambivalence and contradictions of their experiences.

Paper long abstract:

The period 1880- 1920 has been categorized a posteriori from the majority of Greek historians as "transitional". Furthermore, in the light of the evolutionary historical perspective, this period, along with other similar historical periods, constitute the necessary intermissions or intermediary areas which intersect the national historical time in Greece, and "unavoidably" differentiate it from the continuities which are conceived as organic concrete totalities.

The consideration of the years 1890-1920 as hybrid and ambivalent, obstructs its understanding as an "amorphous" present in contrast with the definitely more manifest identity which seems to construct at an imaginary level the past and the coming future. More interesting though seems, as the written texts of the time show, that the historical subjects themselves experienced subjectively that critical time as transitional and narrated it as a "passage" from a previous stage, stable and cohesive but historically exhausted, to a new one, which could acquire similar features, with the anticipation of a more effective fulfillment of its "progressive" mission.

In political terms, the experience of the transition resulted in the fluidity, the uncertainty and constant concern of the social subjects, contributing to the considered as chaotic and unpredictable character of the borderline. The aim of this paper is to grasp, with the help of selected texts, the ambivalent and contradictory feelings, which the social subjects experienced in the dynamics of the capricious conjuncture 1890-1920. Also, to trace the conditions of the management of uncertainties/ certainties, stable/ fluid frameworks, order/ disorder, which the "transition" as a non accomplished process presupposed.