The Mediterranean, a geographical place and poetic topos, undergoes treatment through various languages—scientific, literary, artistic—and becomes an object of writing, an object of representation through mental constructions shaped by history and culture.

The articles published here attest to the diversity of the representational discourse through which images are drawn from a shared collective imagination. The ports and islands, privileged points of the Mediterranean space, poles of unity, objects of discord and war, trade passages, cultural sites, have shaped its history and that of Europe and Africa.

Matrices of civilization but also hotbeds of evil, they assume a versatile role in the historical reality of the place. Objects of fiction, they extend their presence in the transhistorical mental universe, under various forms of representation.

This volume brings together the texts of communications presented at the conference Expressions and Literary Representations of the Mediterranean. Islands and Ports 16th-20th centuries, which took place at the European Cultural Center of Delphi on November 5 and 6, 1999, initiated by the Greek Society of General and Comparative Literature. This is the first scientific meeting of the “Research Group on the Mediterranean,” established within the International Comparative Literature Association.