Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? "Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity" is a brilliant exploration of how the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, Simon Goldhill examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, Goldhill demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, Goldhill addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction - specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire - he discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, "Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity" demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

ISBN 0691149844   Pages 368 ISBN13 9780691149844 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 799 Publisher Princeton University Press   Published in New Jersey Imprint Princeton University Press   Series title Martin Classical Lectures Format Hardback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 18 Jul 2011   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 306.094109034   Academic level Tertiary education, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

List of Illustrations vii INTRODUCTION: Discipline and Revolution: Classics in Victorian Culture 1 PART 1. ART AND DESIRE CHAPTER ONE: The Art of Reception: J. W. Waterhouse and the Painting of Desire in Victorian Britain 23 Fleshliness and Purity 26 Visualizing Desire, Elsewhere 45 Off the Chocolate Box 62 CHAPTER TWO: The Touch of Sappho 65 Viewed in the Light of Greece 66 Touching 72 Sappho on the Strand 79 PART 2. MUSIC AND CULTURAL POLITICS CHAPTER THREE: Who Killed Chevalier Gluck? 87 Revolutionary Opera 90 The Art of Crying and the Happy Ending 97 Disinterring a Classic 104 The German Way 112 London Fashion 116 CHAPTER FOUR: Wagner?s Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism 125 "To be half a day a Greek!" 127 Staging the Sonderweg 134 Endeavoring to Forget 140 PART 3. FICTION: VICTORIAN NOVELS OF ANCIENT ROME CHAPTER FIVE: For God and Empire 153 Every Book Needs a Hero 153 Whose History? 163 Fictionalizing the Past 177 CHAPTER SIX: Virgins, Lions, and Honest Pluck 193 The Knebworth Apollo 193 The Fiction of the Church 202 The Best-Selling Novel in America 215 The Harry Potter Effect 223 Jews, Egyptians, and Other Clich?s of the Popular Sublime 231 SEVEN: Only Connect! 245 The Life of the Author 245 Victoria?s Historian, Darwin?s Parson 251 The Fight for the Middle Ground 258 CODA 265 Notes 273 Bibliography 313 Index 341

[I]mmensely scholarly, highly-entertaining and broad-ranging... Goldhill's timescale offers a new and contentious definition of the term 'Victorian', stretching from 1760 to the 1980s. -- Jane Thomas, Times Higher Education Supplement [G]ripping ... -- "Literary Review Simon Goldhill, a professor at Cambridge, is a leading expert on Greek literature and culture; if you want to know more about the world of Aeschylus and Euripides, Goldhill is your man. -- Daniel Snowman, Literary Review Using reception theory, Goldhill examines paintings, operas, and novels produced in Europe that appropriate stories from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. He shows how artists and writers retold these ancient stories to further their political and religious agendas. The author is persuasive in arguing that in the 19th century the classics were used to bolster an agenda of anti-Semitism, setting the state for WW II. The book contains beautiful color plates and also black-and-white photos showing works of art of the period and poses drawn from classical statuary... The book is well written and the thesis well worth development. -- "Choice [T]he book is of interest from a Wagnerian perspective in the insight it offers into the concerns of a society contemporary with Wagner and just across the water... In its main topics, the painting and historical novel of Britain in the 19th century, this book is an eye-opener in its fascinating material and its approach. -- Michael Dyson, Wagner Journal

 Be the first to write a customer review