British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece

Book excerpt: 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.