British aestheticism and Ancient Greece
Subtitle: Hellenism, reception, gods in exile
By: Stefano Evangelista.
Series: Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Basingstoke
Language: eng
Number of pages: 203
ISBN-13: 9780230547117
Subjects: Aestheticism (Literature); English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- Classical influences; English literature -- Greek influences
Description: British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this rich history of reception, the book aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary aestheticism, its intellectual contexts, its cultural and sexual politics, and its challenges to mainstream Victorian culture. Aestheticism asks its readers to reformulate the very idea of classicism, embodied in ancient Greece, into a radical ideal. Aesthetic writers such as Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde reclaim classical Greece from institutionalised education in order to transform it into a terrain for the appreciation and production of art, vindicating the role of the imagination in scholarly writing and promoting a late-Romantic belief in the power of art and the 'aesthetic' to affect the way we live.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-195) and index.