Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity

Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity
Author: Daniel Orrells
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2011-06-09
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0191617423

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the classical world has been seen as foundational and exemplary to Western civilization. However, the Greeks never invaded and colonised western and northern Europe the way the Romans did, and, conversely, Greece was a difficult place to reach for modern travellers well into the nineteenth century. Inevitably, therefore, the links with ancient Greece were a product of the imagination: an exemplary civilization, in its politics, arts, and culture. There was one problem, however: the Greeks, it seemed, enjoyed pederastic relations. And not only this: one of Athens' most famous teachers, Socrates, was attracted to boys. Daniel Orrells offers a fresh, original examination of how modern thinkers in Germany and Britain, who were so invested in a model of history that directly traced the European present back to an ancient Greek past, negotiated the tricky issue of ancient Greek pederasty.

Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity

Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity
Author: Daniel Orrells
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2011-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199236445

For nineteenth-century thinkers in Germany and Britain, who looked to Greece as the acme of past civilization, the Greeks' enjoyment of pederasty presented a problem. Daniel Orrells's study explores the way in which this awkward issue was negotiated.

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity
Author: Laura Eastlake
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2019
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0198833032

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.

The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity

The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity
Author: David Kuchta
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2002-05-21
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0520214935

In 1666 King Charles II introduced a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. This text examines the inspiration behind this royal revolution in masculine attire.

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity
Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009306456

A brilliant exposition of how the Bible and classical antiquity are central to the formation of Victorian self-understanding.

Masculine Plural

Masculine Plural
Author: Jennifer Ingleheart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2018-09-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192551612

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate and uncomfortable nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918), whose clandestine writings not only explore homoerotic desires but also offer insightful comments on Classical education. Now a marginalized figure, Bainbrigge's surviving works - a verse drama entitled Achilles in Scyros featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls, and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys - vividly demonstrate the queer potential of Classics and are marked by a celebration of the pleasures of sex and a refusal to apologize for homoerotic desire. Reprinted here in their entirety, they are accompanied by chapters setting them in their social and literary context, including their parallels with the writings of Bainbrigge's contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, and A. E. Housman. What emerges is a provocative new perspective on the history of sexuality and the place of the Classics within that history, which demonstrates that a highly queer version of Classics was possible in private contexts.

The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination

The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination
Author: Adeline Grand-Clément
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350169749

This volume tackles the role of smell, under-explored in relation to the other senses, in the modern rejection, reappraisal and idealisation of antiquity. Among the senses olfaction in particular has often been overlooked in classical reception studies due to its evanescent nature, which makes this sense difficult to apprehend in its past instantiations. And yet, the smells associated with a given figure or social group convey a rich imagery which in turn connotes specific values: perfumes, scents and foul odours both reflect and mould the ways in which a society thinks or acts. Smells also help to distinguish between male and female, citizens and strangers, and play an important role during rituals. The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination focuses on the representation of ancient smells - both enticing and repugnant - in the visual and performative arts from the late 18th century up to the 21st century. The individual contributions explore painting, sculpture, literature and film, but also theatrical performance, museum exhibitions, advertising, television series, historical reenactment and graphic novels, which have all played a part in reshaping modern audiences' perceptions and experiences of the antique.

The Passions of John Addington Symonds

The Passions of John Addington Symonds
Author: Shane Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2022-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192692496

John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 - Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain's most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs, a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of Symonds's vast body of work? This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself—and of what it means to live in it.

The Image of Man

The Image of Man
Author: George L. Mosse
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 1998-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190284382

What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be manly? How has our notion of masculinity changed over the years? In this book, noted historian George L. Mosse provides the first historical account of the masculine stereotype in modern Western culture, tracing the evolution of the idea of manliness to reveal how it came to embody physical beauty, courage, moral restraint, and a strong will. This stereotype, he finds, originated in the tumultuous changes of the eighteenth century, as Europe's dominant aristocrats grudgingly yielded to the rise of the professional, bureaucratic, and commercial middle classes. Mosse reveals how the new bourgeoisie, faced with a bewildering, rapidly industrialized world, latched onto the knightly ideal of chivalry. He also shows how the rise of universal conscription created a "soldierly man" as an ideal type. In bringing his examination up to the present, Mosse studies the key historical roles of the so-called "fairer sex" (women) and "unmanly men" (Jews and homosexuals) in defining and maintaining the male stereotype, and considers the possible erosion of that stereotype in our own time.