Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity Book

List of Illustrations vii

INTRODUCTION: Discipline and Revolution: Classics in Victorian Culture 1

PART 1. ART AND DESIRE

CHAPTER ONE: The Art of Reception: J. W. Waterhouse and the Painting of Desire in Victorian Britain 23

Fleshliness and Purity 26

Visualizing Desire, Elsewhere 45

Off the Chocolate Box 62

CHAPTER TWO: The Touch of Sappho 65

Viewed in the Light of Greece 66

Touching 72

Sappho on the Strand 79

PART 2. MUSIC AND CULTURAL POLITICS

CHAPTER THREE: Who Killed Chevalier Gluck? 87

Revolutionary Opera 90

The Art of Crying and the Happy Ending 97

Disinterring a Classic 104

The German Way 112

London Fashion 116

CHAPTER FOUR: Wagner's Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism 125

"To be half a day a Greek!" 127

Staging the Sonderweg 134

Endeavoring to Forget 140

PART 3. FICTION: VICTORIAN NOVELS OF ANCIENT ROME

CHAPTER FIVE: For God and Empire 153

Every Book Needs a Hero 153

Whose History? 163

Fictionalizing the Past 177

CHAPTER SIX: Virgins, Lions, and Honest Pluck 193

The Knebworth Apollo 193

The Fiction of the Church 202

The Best-Selling Novel in America 215

The Harry Potter Effect 223

Jews, Egyptians, and Other Clichés of the Popular Sublime 231

SEVEN: Only Connect! 245

The Life of the Author 245

Victoria's Historian, Darwin's Parson 251

The Fight for the Middle Ground 258

CODA 265

Notes 273

Bibliography 313

Index 341