Masculinity and Ancient Rome in the Victorian Cultural ImaginationMasculinity and Ancient Rome in the Victorian Cultural Imagination examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire, and these manifold and often contradictory representations are used as vehicles equally to capture the martial virtue of Wellington and to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde. In the works of Thomas Macaulay, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, among others, Rome emerges as a contested space with an array of possible scripts and signifiers which can be used to frame masculine ideals, or to vilify perceived deviance from those ideals, though with a value and significance often very different to ancient Greek models. Sitting at the intersection of reception studies, gender studies, and interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies across discourses ranging from education and politics, this volume offers the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome as a cultural touchstone for nineteenth-century manliness and Victorian codifications of masculinity. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Classical Education and Manliness in the Nineteenth Century | 15 |
Political Masculinity in the Age of Reform | 55 |
Imperial Manliness | 101 |
Decadent Rome and Late Victorian Masculinity | 167 |
| 229 | |
| 245 | |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic aestheticism ancient Rome Anthony Trollope Antonina Arnold artist authority become Beetle boys Britain British Empire British imperial Brown's Schooldays Brutus century chapter Charles Chaudval Cicero civilization Cleopatra Collins Collins's conservative cultural decadent decline and fall degeneration deviance discourse Egypt elite embody emperor Eric Farrar feminine fin-de-siècle Flavian Greece Greek Harmachis Hermanric heroes ideologies imperial manliness imperial masculinity Imperialist Julius Caesar King Kipling language Latin liberal literary literature London Macaulay male manliness Marius masculine masculine identity masculine virtue military modern moral muscular Christian Mutiny Napoleon narrative Nero Nero's Neronian nineteenth nineteenth-century novel Oscar Wilde Palliser Palliser's Pater physical political manliness political masculinity popular Prime Minister readers reading reform Regulus Roman Empire Roman parallel Roman past schoolboy fiction social Stalky statesmen styles of masculinity theatre Tom Brown Tom Brown's Schooldays tradition Trollope's values Victorian Literature Victorian masculinity Wellington whilst Wilde writing