Publisher:
Oxford University Press USA - OSO, Oxford
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...
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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impact of the classical world on his life and work, offering new perspectives on canonical texts and close analyses of unpublished material. Cover -- Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity -- Copyright -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Contributors -- Introduction: Taking Parnassus to Piccadilly -- I: Wilde´s Classical Education -- 1: Mahaffy and Wilde: A Study in Provocation -- Introduction -- How to Appreciate the Greeks: Social Life in Greece -- Cheating the Devil: Travels with Mahaffy -- Dining on the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: Wilde and Democratizing Hellenism -- 2: How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds´s Studies of the Greek Poets -- Introduction -- Introducing Studies -- Studies and Symonds´s Influence on Wilde -- Wilde´s Annotations: An Overview and an Example -- The Annotations and Wilde´s Interests -- `The Women of Homer´ and Wilde´s `Women´ -- Conclusion -- Postscript: Wilde´s Bookmarks? -- 3: `Very fine & -- Semitic´: Wilde´s Herodotus -- 4: Wilde´s Abstractions: Notes on Literæ Humaniores, 1876-1878 -- II: Wilde as Dramatist -- 5: Beyond Sculpture: Wilde´s Responses to Greek Theatre in the 1880s -- Archaeological/Architectural -- Sculptural -- Plasticity -- Scenic -- Modernity -- 6: Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama, 1880-1895 -- `Text? Text? ... What the hell is text?´ -- Greek Plays as Audience Events -- The Impossibility of Being Earnest -- The Importance of Adaptation -- Wilde´s Tragicomedy -- 7: `Tragedy in the disguise of mirth´: Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Wilde -- 8: Death by Unrequited Eros: Salome, Hippolytus, and Wilde´s Inversion of Tragedy -- Introduction -- Salomesque Phaedra -- Unbearable Lightness: Narraboth´s Suicide -- Narraboth, Phaedra, and Self-image -- III: Wilde as Philosopher and Cultural Critic -- 9: Imagining Utopia: Oxford Hellenism and the Aesthetic Alternative -- Oxford and Empire: The Politics of Platonism -- In Search of Utopia: Oscar Wilde as Cultural Critic.
