Victorians and Modern Greece examines the representation of nineteenth-century Greece in British magazines, fiction, poetry, and travel writing, revealing the popular reception of the modern nation in the Victorian period. Reflecting upon the tensions–ancient and modern, oriental and European, primitive and developed–emerging from Victorian texts on Modern Greece, the 12 essays in this volume analyse these texts and their role in reconceptualising the national identity and culture of Britain and Greece through their encounter with each other. Featuring writers such as Mary Shelley, Christopher Wordsworth, William Thackeray, Theodore Bent, Isabella Fyvie Mayo, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee, as well as anonymous authors publishing in popular periodicals, and a broad range of topics from travel and fashion to political crises and the pervasive appeal of ruins, this book tells the story of Modern Greece from British perspectives, at a time when Greece was struggling to achieve self-definition among conflicting geopolitical interests. Victorians and Modern Greece also opens up Victorian studies to minor or marginal voices and narratives which addressed worldly concerns and Britain’s global affiliations. With its comparative perspective, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of both Victorian literature and culture and of the culture and history of Modern Greece.

In Ladies' Greek, Yopie Prins illuminates a culture of female classical literacy that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the formation of women's colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a "dead" language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote "some Greek upon the margin—lady's Greek, without the accents." Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing, Greek. Mediating between professional philology and the popularization of classics, these passionate amateurs became an important medium for classical transmission. Combining archival research on the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy, Prins demonstrates how women turned to this genre to perform a passion for ancient Greek, full of eros and pathos. She focuses on five tragedies—Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae—to analyze a wide range of translational practices by women and to explore the ongoing legacy of Ladies' Greek. Key figures in this story include Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, Janet Case and Jane Harrison, Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer, and A. Mary F. Robinson and H.D. The book also features numerous illustrations, including photographs of early performances of Greek tragedy at women's colleges. The first comparative study of Anglo-American Hellenism, Ladies' Greek opens up new perspectives in transatlantic Victorian studies and the study of classical reception, translation, and gender.

This collection of essays explores the questions of what counted as knowledge in Victorian Britain, who defined knowledge and the knowledgeable, by what means and by what criteria. During the Victorian period, the structure of knowledge took on a new and recognizably modern form, and the disciplines we now take for granted took shape. The ways in which knowledge was tested also took on a new form, with the rise of written examinations. New institutions of knowledge were created: museums were important at the start of the period, universities had become prominent by the end. Victorians needed to make sense of the sheer scale of new information, to popularize it, and at the same time to exclude ignorance and error - a role carried out by encyclopaedias and popular publications. By studying the Victorian organization of knowledge in its institutional, social, and intellectual settings, these essays contribute to our wider consideration of the complex and much debated concept of knowledge.

This collection of essays focuses on the reception of Plato and Greek political thought in the work of some major (pre)Victorian classical scholars and expands on a remarkable range of hotly debated issues on the interpretation of Greek antiquity. The central figure in this volume is the radical philosopher, utilitarian, and Platonist George Grote, whose works on the history of Greece and Plato moved away from traditional models of classical interpretation. His works and their background are critically explored in light of his philosophical commitment and political radicalism. Article IV brings to light a forgotten manuscript by Grote, "On the Character of Socrates," produced in the 1820s. Grote sought to counter the current literature on ancient Greece and its predominant motifs, which is here examined in its own right along with an independent study on Bishop Connop Thirlwall's influential History of Greece. The second half of this volume is devoted to analyzing important aspects of the revival of Platonic studies in the ideological and discursive context of early and middle Victorian times. This collection of essays presents comprehensive and illuminating contextual analyses of nineteenth-century works on classical reception, providing simultaneously a rich bibliographic guide to further research.

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.

"Dowling's compact and intelligently argued study is concerned with the late-Victorian emergence of homosexuality as an identity rather than as an activity.... [This identity] was formed out of notions of Hellenism current in mid-century Oxford that were held to be lofty and ennobling and even a kind of substitute for a waning Christianity."—Nineteenth- Century Literature "Dowling's study is an exceptionally clear-headed and far-reaching analysis of the way Greek studies operated as a 'homosexual code' during the great age of English university reform.... Beautifully written and argued with subtlety, the book is indispensable for students of Victorian literature, culture, gender studies, and the nature of social change."—Choice "Hellenism and Homosexuality... presents a detailed and knowledgeable... account of such factors as the Oxford Movement and the influence of such Victorian dons as Jowett and Pater and the evolving evaluations of Classical Greece, its mores and morals. It is also enhanced by [an] analysis of Greek terminology with homosexual connotations, as to be found, for instance, in Plato's Republic."—Lambda Book Report