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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.
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 Clichés 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
Overview
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 ...