Focusing on the provocative and multilayered work of Konstantinos Kavafis, this book maps new areas in the field of critical theory and offers an interdisciplinary study of the construction of erotic desire in poetry in general, through the lens of metonymic discourse and anti-economic libidinal tropes.

Pavlos Roilos demonstrates that the various revisions of the terms of artistic production, the market economy, and the circulation of love in different socio-cultural contexts at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in Europe have been reformulated in Kavafis' poetry in new subversive ways that promoted an "unorthodox" verbal and libidinal anti-economy of enjoyment.

Pavlos Roilos is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Greek Studies at Harvard University, where he also holds the George Seferis Chair and is a Faculty Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He has authored and edited eight books, including Towards a Ritual Poetics (co-authored with Dimitris Yatromanolakis, 2003), Ampho-teroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (2005), C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy (2009), Imagination and Logos: Essays on C. P. Cavafy (editor, 2010), Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium (editor, 2014).