British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this rich history of reception, the book aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary aestheticism, its intellectual contexts, its cultural and sexual politics, and its challenges to mainstream Victorian culture. Aestheticism asks its readers to reformulate the very idea of classicism, embodied in ancient Greece, into a radical ideal. Aesthetic writers such as Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde reclaim classical Greece from institutionalised education in order to transform it into a terrain for the appreciation and production of art, vindicating the role of the imagination in scholarly writing and promoting a late-Romantic belief in the power of art and the 'aesthetic' to affect the way we live.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this history of reception, it aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary aestheticism, its intellectual contexts, and its challenges to mainstream Victorian culture.

Eye and Art in Ancient Greece examines the art of ancient Greece through reconstructions of how the Greeks saw and understood the products of their own visual culture. The material is approached using a newly developed methodology of archaeoaesthetics by which past modes of vision and perception are examined in conjunction with prevailing notions of pleasure and judgement with the purpose of identifying the visual and psychological contexts within which the aesthetics of a culture emerge. Through a wide-ranging examination of ideas found in early written sources, the book examines various key aspects of Greek visual culture, such as continuity and change, nudity, identity, lifelikeness, mimesis, personation and enactment, symmetria, dance, harmony, and the modal representation of emotions, with the aim of comprehending how and why choices were made in the conception and making of artifacts. Special attention is given to factors contributing to the formation of taste and the emergence and transmission over time of concepts of art and beauty and the means by which they were identified and judged. The approach facilitates encounters with the material in ways that give rise to new insights into how the ancient Greeks experienced their own visual culture and how Greek art may be understood by us today.

An anthology of works commenting on the perception of beauty in art, structure and style in literature, and aesthetic judgement.

Oscar Wilde's imagination was haunted by ancient Greece; this book traces its presence in his life and works.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.