British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile [Hardcover]

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.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

'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

'Stefano Evangelista's first book is an elegant, intelligent, short, but significant contribution to the growing bibliography not just on the aestheticism of the final decades of the nineteenth century but also on the Victorian engagement with antiquity. Each of the four central chapters, framed by a brief introduction and conclusion, examines a familiar icon of the movement Walter Pater, first and foremost, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde but each also develops a fresh argument, not least by the focus on aestheticism's profound and complex fantasy of Hellenism. Hellenism, in this context at least, inevitably privileges desire and gender, and the volume is particularly good when it intertwines the self-positioning of Lee and Field through their involvements with Pater and male models of classicizing, sexualizedl&