Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity

by Kathleen Riley (Editor), Alastair J. L. Blanshard (Editor), Iarla Manny (Editor)

Overview

Few authors of the Victorian period were as immersed in classical learning as Oscar Wilde. Although famous now and during his lifetime as a wit, aesthete, and master epigrammist, Wilde distinguished himself early on as a talented classical scholar, studying at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford and winning academic prizes and distinctions at both institutions. His undergraduate notebooks as well as his essays and articles on ancient topics reveal a mind engrossed in problems in classical scholarship and fascinated by the relationship between ancient and modern thought. His first publications were English translations of classical texts and even after he had 'left Parnassus for Piccadilly' antiquity continued to provide him with a critical vocabulary in which he could express himself and his aestheticism, and a compelling set of narratives to fire his artist's imagination. His debt to Greece and Rome is evident throughout his writings, from the sparkling wit of society plays like The Importance of Being Earnest to the extraordinary meditation on suffering that is De Profundis, written during his incarceration in Reading Gaol. Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity brings together scholars from across the disciplines of classics, English literature, theatre and performance studies, and the history of ideas to explore the varied and profound impact that Graeco-Roman antiquity had on Wilde's life and work. This wide-ranging collection covers all the major genres of his literary output; it includes new perspectives on his most celebrated and canonical texts and close analyses of unpublished material, revealing as never before the enduring breadth and depth of his love affair with the classics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192506252
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	11/24/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Kathleen Riley is a former British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and now a freelance writer, theatre historian, and critic. She is the author of Nigel Hawthorne on Stage (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), The Reception and Performance of Euripides' Herakles: Reasoning Madness (OUP, 2008), and The Astaires: Fred&Adele (OUP USA, 2012), which has been optioned for a British feature film. She reviews plays and books on dance for the Times Literary Supplement and is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Her current projects include a monograph exploring the ancient Greek concept of Nostos (homecoming) and its manifestations in literature and drama over the last hundred years. Alastair Blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. He works extensively in the field of Classical Reception studies, serving as an Associate Editor for the Classical Receptions Journal and the subject-area editor for Classical Reception for the Oxford Classical Dictionary, as well as overseeing the Classics after Antiquity series for Cambridge University Press as one of its general editors. His publications include Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome on Film (with Kim Shahabudin; Bloomsbury, 2011), and Classical World: All That Matters (Hodder and Stoughton, 2015). Iarla Manny studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin and Balliol College, Oxford. His MPhil thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins's Hellenism and Hebraism was awarded the Gaisford Graduate Dissertation Prize by the University of Oxford's Faculty of Classics, and he is a recent recipient of the Michael Comber PhD Studentship in the Reception of the Classical World, held jointly at the Open University and St Hilda's College, Oxford. He is currently completing his doctoral thesis on Oscar Wilde and Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
0. Introduction: Taking Parnassus to Piccadilly, Kathleen Riley
I. WILDE'S CLASSICAL EDUCATION
1. Mahaffy and Wilde: A Study in Provocation, Alastair J. L. Blanshard
2. How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets, Gideon Nisbet
3. Very fine & Semitic': Wilde's Herodotus, Iain Ross
4. Wilde's Abstractions: Notes on Literae Humaniores, 1876-8, Joseph Bristow
II. WILDE AS DRAMATIST
5. Beyond Sculpture: Wilde's Responses to Greek Theatre in the 1880s, John Stokes
6. Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama, 1880-95, Clare L. E. Foster
7. Tragedy in the disguise of mirth': Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Wilde, Isobel Hurst
8. Death by Unrequited eros: Salome, Hippolytus, and Wilde's Inversion of Tragedy, Kostas Boyiopoulos
III. WILDE AS PHILOSOPHER AND CULTURAL CRITIC
9. Imagining Utopia: Oxford Hellenism and the Aesthetic Alternative, Leanne Grech
10. All the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy': Wilde's 'Epistola' and the Euripidean Christ, Kathleen Riley
11. Burning with a 'hard, gem-like flame': Heraclitus and Hedonism in Wilde's Writing, Kate Hext
12. Cosmopolitan Classicism: Wilde between Greece and France, Stefano Evangelista
IV. WILDE AS NOVELIST: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
13. Wilde's New Republic: Platonic Questions in Dorian Gray, Marylu Hill
14. From eros to Romosexuality: Love and Sex in Dorian Gray, Nikolai Endres
15. Oscar as (Ovid as) Orpheus: Misogyny and Pederasty in Dorian Gray and the Metamorphoses, Iarla Manny
V. WILDE AND ROME
16. Wilde and Roman History, Philip E. Smith II
17. The Criminal Emperors of Ancient Rome and Wilde's 'true historical sense', Shushma Malik
18. I knew I had a brother!': Fraternity and Identity in Plautus' Menaechmi and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Serena S. Witzke
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity powerfully demonstrates the degree to which Wilde's reading fueled the development of a mind that "could feel itself alive" only through encounters with literature." — Rebecca N. Mitchell, Victorian Studies

"Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity offers new perspectives on his most celebrated and canonical texts by adopting a uniquely multidisciplinary approach with insights into Wilde's classical sources that will be highly useful for in-depth studies of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity delineates the influence and breadth of Wilde's knowledge in the Classics, offering specific examples in the original Greek, French, Latin, and English that provide excellent source material for Wilde's fascinating essays, plays, and his novel. Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity has a comprehensive bibliography and provides a lasting contribution to Wildean scholarship." — Annette M. Magid, Papers on Language and Literature

"The authors and editors of this important new book are to be congratulated for compiling a collection of informative contributions on health care and social work around the world. Detailed, insightful, and global in scope, it will serve as an important resource for many years to come." — James Midgley, PhD, Professor of the Graduate School, School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley

"An excellently edited volume ... of the highest scholarly standard, which will no doubt be of interest to both Wilde scholars and classicists." — Xavier Giudicelli, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens

"Wilde emerges as interesting, brilliant, sharply witty, complex, both idealistic and cynical, but a dedicated classicist, sadly out of step with the mores of most of his contemporaries. ... his love affair with the Classics continued until he died, as this collection of essays amply demonstrates." — Jo-Marie Claassen, The Classical Journal

"Individual essays explore Wilde's classical education, the shaping influence of his experience as a spectator of classical drama, the impact of his classical training on his philosophy and fiction, and the significance of Roman antiquity in his writings." — Andrea Henderson, Studies in English Literature

"The book adeptly fulfills its mission statement "to demonstrate in what ways Wilde's classicism is typical, in what ways heterodox or distinctive, and where it is situated in relation to Victorian social and intellectual frameworks" . . . The assembly of Victorianists and Classicists from multiple disciplines . . . has created a multifaceted successor to Iain Ross's Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2013), and offers new contributions not only to studies in Oscar Wilde and the late Victorian period, but also reciprocally to Classics." —Julianna K. Will, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"This is a highly satisfying book, stimulating, varied, visually appealing, refreshingly jargon-free and exceptionally well edited. . . . It has much to offer anyone interested in the enigma of Wilde" —Peter Raby, The Classical Review

"Eighteen years after the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death in 1900, Oxford University Press has published this excellent monographic study . . . an excellent and highly recommended contribution to Wildean studies from the perspective of the classical tradition." —Pau Gilabert, International Journal of the Classical Tradition

"I greatly enjoyed the varied viewpoints of these illuminating essays, which greatly deepened my understanding of Wilde's complex love and use of Classics and can heartily recommend the book to scholars and post-graduate students of Classical Reception, English Literature and Theatre Studies. The volume amply fulfils its stated aim of offering a model for studies based around an individual and their use of the Classical tradition." —Claire Gruzelier, Classics for All

"The analysis and inclusion of a variety of sources, including unpublished, annotated manuscripts, transcripts, and Wilde's notebooks, are an invaluable resource and welcome additions to ongoing discussions on Wilde. . . . the debates present are original, well-conceived and offer readers a concrete position from which to expand and further consider Wilde's classicism." —Robert Finnigan, The Review of English Studies

From the Publisher