Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism

Beginning with Tennyson’s In Memoriam and continuing by way of Hopkins and Swinburne to the novels of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, Richard Dellamora draws on journals, letters, censored texts, and pornography to examine the cultural construction of masculinity in Victorian literature.

Central to the struggle over the meaning of masculine desire was the institutional politics of Oxford University, where Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater were principal players. As...