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Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire: this volume examines how these manifold and often contradictory representations are deployed in a range of ways in the works of authors from Thomas Macaulay to Rudyard Kipling to create useable models of masculinity.
List of contents
- Frontmatter
- List of Illustrations
- 0: Introduction
- Part I: Classical Education and Manliness in the Nineteenth Century
- 1: Reading, Reception, and Elite Education
- 2: Imperial Boys and Men of Letters
- Part II: Political Masculinity in the Age of Reform
- 3: Napoleonic Legacies and the Reform Act of 1832
- 4: Caesar, Cicero, and Anthony Trollope's Public Men
- Part III: Imperial Manliness
- 5: Liberal Imperialism and Wilkie Collins's Antonina
- 6: New Imperialism and the Problem of Cleopatra
- Part IV: Decadent Rome and Late-Victorian Masculinity
- 7: Rome, London, and Condemning the Metropolitan Male
- 8: The Decadent Imagination: Nero, Pater, and Wilde
- Conclusion: 'Be Prepared' - Ancient Rome and the Modern Man, 1900-1918
- Endmatter
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Laura Eastlake is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University, having previously taught English and Classics at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century masculinities and how Victorian writers like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde used the ancient world to construct different styles of manliness. She has published on decadent masculinities of the fin de siècle and Wilkie Collins's little-known first novel
Antonina. She is also the Public Engagement Officer for the Classical Reception Studies Network (CRSN) and an Editor of the Wilkie Collins Journal.
Summary
Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire: this volume examines how these manifold and often contradictory representations are deployed in a range of ways in the works of authors from Thomas Macaulay to Rudyard Kipling to create useable models of masculinity.
Additional text
it is hard not to enjoy Eastlake's wide reading, her careful choice of sources, her detailed interpretations, her well-chosen illustrations. From the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the Roman ideal seemed to have been monopolised by Napoleon, while Greek imagination and flexibility could be better appropriated in Britain, to the militarising ideologies of turn-of-the-century imperialists, we are taken through a vast range of different and often contradictory interpretations, literary, political and cultural. Distinctly enlightening.
