British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece, Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile

Kort omtale fra Nielsen Bookdata
This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this history of reception, it aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary aestheticism, its intellectual contexts, and its challenges to mainstream Victorian culture.

Forfatterbiografi
STEFANO EVANGELISTA is Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, UK. He has published a number of articles on nineteenth-century English and comparative literature, and is currently editing a volume on the reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe.

Table of contents
Contents Acknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction: The Origins Pater, 'Winckelmann', and the Aesthetic Life Vernon Lee and the Aesthetics of Doubt 'Two dear Greek Women': The Aesthetic Ecstasy of Michael Field The Greek Life of Oscar Wilde Afterword: The End of Aestheticism: A Dream, Three Trials, Two Ghosts Notes Bibliography Index

Omtale fra Nielsen Bookdata
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.

Review - Nielsen Bookdata
'Evangelista's short book, which focuses on Walter Pater, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and Oscar Wilde, offers one of the most exciting and subtle analyses of late nineteenth-century aestheticism that I have read... British Aestheticism and Classical Greece is a major contribution to the study of late-nineteenth century literature and the history of sexuality.' - Martha Vinicus, Review of English Studies