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This book focuses on the role that the Oxford classical curriculum has had in shaping Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism. It positions Wilde as a classically trained intellectual and outlines the path he took to gain recognition as a writer and promoter of the aesthetic movement. This narrative is conveyed through a broad range of literary sources, including Wilde’s travel poetry, American lectures, and canonical works like ‘The Critic as Artist’, The Soul of Man, The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis. This study proposes that Wilde approached aestheticism as a personalised, self-directed learning experience – a mode of self-culture – which could be used to maintain an intellectual life outside of the university. It also explores Wilde’s thoughts on education and considers the significance of male friendship at Oxford, and in Wilde’s life and literature.
Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 examines the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures in Decadent Literatures in England and Germany at the turn of the century. This book argues that the role of Orientalism in literary Decadence uniquely exposes its paradoxical engagement with other cultures. In bringing together two fin-de-siècle European literatures, this comparative study makes a case for the transnational, if not imperial, nature of Decadence. The East emerges as an 'indispensable' mediator between various versions of European Decadence. The book examines the role of the East with specific reference to selected English and German authors: starting fro...
Making and Unmaking Ancient Memory explores the way in which ancient Greeks and Romans represented their past, and in turn how modern literature and scholarship has approached the reception and transmission of some aspects of ancient culture. The contributions, organised into three sections – Political Legacies, Religious Identities, and Literary Traditions – explore case studies in memory and reception of the past. Through studying the techniques and strategies of ancient historiography, biography, hagiography, and art, as well as their effectiveness, this volume demonstrates how humanity has inevitably conveyed memory and history with (sub)conscious biases and preconceived ideas. In the current age of alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth discourses, these chapters highlight that such phenomena are by no means a recent development. This book offers valuable scholarly perspectives to academics and scholars interested in memory, historiography, and representations of the past in the ancient world, as well as those working on literary traditions and reception studies more broadly.
A brilliant exposition of how the Bible and classical antiquity are central to the formation of Victorian self-understanding.
In this lively and wide-ranging study, Peter Swallow explores the reception of Aristophanes in Britain throughout the long-nineteenth century, setting it in the broader context of Victorian Classicism and, more specifically, the period's reception of Greek tragedy. Swallow shows the surprising extent to which Aristophanes was repurposed across an array of mediums in Victorian Britain, and demonstrates that Aristophanic reception in the period was always a process of speaking to contemporary issues--making Old Comedy new. The book examines two strands of Aristophanic reception: the political and the aesthetic. From the start of the long-nineteenth century, the British reception of Aristophane...
This book examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature written in England and Germany, exploring the relationship between Orientalism, Decadence, and cosmopolitanism, arguing that representations of the East played a critical role in the literary landscape of Decadence over this period.
Few authors of the Victorian period were as immersed in classical learning as Oscar Wilde. Although famous now and during his lifetime as a wit, aesthete, and master epigrammist, Wilde distinguished himself early on as a talented classical scholar, studying at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford and winning academic prizes and distinctions at both institutions. His undergraduate notebooks as well as his essays and articles on ancient topics reveal a mind engrossed in problems in classical scholarship and fascinated by the relationship between ancient and modern thought. His first publications were English translations of classical texts and even after he had 'left Parnassus for Piccadilly' ant...