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impact of the classical world on his life and work, offering new perspectives on canonical texts and close analyses of unpublished material.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