Oscar Wilde And Ancient Greece

Oscar Wilde's imagination was haunted by ancient Greece; this book traces its presence in his life and works.

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.

"Celebrated now and during his lifetime as a wit and aesthete, Oscar Wilde was also a talented classicist whose writings evince an enduring fascination with Graeco-Roman antiquity. This volume explores the impact of the classical world on his life and work, offering new perspectives on canonical texts and close analyses of unpublished material."--

Greek Epigram in Reception is a chronological survey of the reception history of the Greek Anthology, a Byzantine collection of ancient Greek short poems known as epigrams. Tracing the strange evolution of the Greek Anthology from the early nineteenth century to the years after the first World War, the volume analyses the complex webs of rhetoric that are spun as writers and translators bring their different agendas to bear on the Anthology's text, pruning it to meet their needs. As so little was known about its poets, and because it stood for the 'Anthology' of the Greeks and their culture, the text became the battleground during the 1870s-90s on which normative and dissident interpretations of Ancient Greece were fought out. An emergent mass readership became caught between opposing and rhetorically loaded accounts, casting the Anthology and thus the ancient race on whom the British were supposed to be modelling themselves as patriots and doting spouses or lovers of male Beauty, like the Decadent sensation Oscar Wilde. The after-effects of this cultural war were to stretch into the 1920s, and still echo today.

Comprehensive volume of international research on the European reception of Oscar Wilde.

Professor Kohl's aim is to gain fresh insight into his literary and critical œuvre of Oscar Wilde. He analyses each of his works on the basis of a textually oriented interpretation, taking equal account of the biographical and intellectual contexts through the use of contradictions that Wilde show as individualism and convention.