Stefano Evangelista

This volume explores the significance of cosmopolitanism for literary studies and argues that the English fin de siècle witnessed an intense debate about cosmopolitanism which in turn influenced literary representations of individual and national identity, and shaped attitudes towards the idea of world literature.

Citizens of Nowhere

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is now widely recognised not only as one of the most representative figures of the British fin de siècle, but as one of the most influential Anglophone authors of the nineteenth century. In Britain Wilde suffered a long period of comparative neglect following the scandal of his conviction for 'gross indecency' in 1895; and it is only recently that his works have been reassessed. But while Wilde was subjected to silence in Britain, he became a European phenomenon. His famous dandyism, his witticisms, paradoxes and provocations became the object of imitation and parody; his controversial aesthetic doctrines were a strong influence not only on decadent writers, but also on the development of symbolist and modernist cultures. This collection of essays by leading international scholars and translators traces the cultural impact of Oscar Wilde's work across Europe, from the earliest translations and performances of his works in the 1890s to the present day.

The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe

Catherine Maxwell

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), dramatist, novelist and critic, was late Victorian England’s unofficial Poet Laureate. Swinburne was admired by his contemporaries for his technical brilliance, his facility with classical and medieval forms, and his courage in expressing his sensual, erotic imagination. He was one of the most important Victorian poets, the founding figure for British aestheticism, and the dominant influence for fin-de-siècle and many modernist poets. This collection of eleven new essays by leading international scholars offers a thorough revaluation of this fascinating and complex figure. It situates him in the light of current critical work on cosmopolitanism, politics, form, Victorian Hellenism, gender and sexuality, the arts, and aestheticism and its contested relation to literary modernism. The essays in this collection reassess Swinburne’s work and reconstruct his vital and often provocative contribution to the Victorian cultural debate.

Unofficial Laureate

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Comprehensive volume of international research on the European reception of Oscar Wilde.

Elizabeth Prettejohn

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of classical culture in later ages. These superficially diverging interests actually went closely hand-in-hand: it can plausibly be asserted that it is the classical tradition in its broadest sense, including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities, which forms Pater's principal subject as a writer. Although he initially approached antiquity obliquely, through the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the poetry of William Morris, later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, and particularly about Greece, his first love. The essays in this collection cover all his major works and reveal a many-sided and inspirational figure, whose achievements helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century, and whose conception of Classics as cross-disciplinary and outward-looking can be a model to scholars and students today. They discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy, and in doing so they also illuminate Pater's position within his Victorian context, among figures such as J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison, as well as his place in the study and reception of Classics today.

Stefano Evangelista

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