Search engine for discovering works of Art, research articles, and books related to Art and Culture
Javascript must be enabled to continue!
How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets
View through CrossRef
As a student at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde was often seen with his copies of an acclaimed (and locally infamous) new popular survey of Greek literature, John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (in two series, 1873/6). Those copies survive, and are extensively annotated. Although they must be read with caution, these annotations show Wilde to have been a widely read and increasingly confident young classicist, and hint at his nascent ambition as a translator. Together with relevant manuscript material, the annotations take on more than merely academic significance: they show how the young Wilde, at Symonds’s prompting, was turning ancient Greek cultural insights into present-day possibilities. His intense formative engagement with Studies was to prove fundamental to the mature Wilde’s self-fashioning as a novelist, playwright, and cultural phenomenon.
Title: How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets
Description:
As a student at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde was often seen with his copies of an acclaimed (and locally infamous) new popular survey of Greek literature, John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (in two series, 1873/6).
Those copies survive, and are extensively annotated.
Although they must be read with caution, these annotations show Wilde to have been a widely read and increasingly confident young classicist, and hint at his nascent ambition as a translator.
Together with relevant manuscript material, the annotations take on more than merely academic significance: they show how the young Wilde, at Symonds’s prompting, was turning ancient Greek cultural insights into present-day possibilities.
His intense formative engagement with Studies was to prove fundamental to the mature Wilde’s self-fashioning as a novelist, playwright, and cultural phenomenon.
Related Results
Wilde Between the Sheets
Wilde Between the Sheets
Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage and De Profundis argues that Oscar Wilde’s narrative strategies reveal a quick-witted, ingenious fighter—an active agent who tes...
Mahaffy and Wilde
Mahaffy and Wilde
This chapter explores the relationship between Wilde and his Trinity College Classics tutor, John Pentland Mahaffy. This complex relationship played a vital part in the formation o...
Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity
Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity
Few authors of the Victorian period were as immersed in classical learning as Oscar Wilde. He studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, winning academic prizes and dis...
Beyond Sculpture
Beyond Sculpture
In the 1880s, Wilde responded with enthusiasm to reconstructions of classical Greek theatre staged in Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and his published reviews draw extensively on h...
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Unlike his mentor Pater, Wilde never wrote an essay on ‘Style’, but this chapter argues that Wilde’s career as essayist, playwright, poet, and intellectual provocateur hinges on hi...
Oscar Wilde in Context
Oscar Wilde in Context
Oscar Wilde was a courageous individualist whose path-breaking life and work were shaped in the crucible of his time and place, deeply marked by the controversies of his era. This ...
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
While Oscar Wilde’s plays—particularly his comedies—have often been read in terms of politics of gender identity and social class, it has not often been observed that they were als...
The Importance of Staging Oscar
The Importance of Staging Oscar
Oscar Wilde was adopted as something like a posthumous writer in residence at the Gate Theatre in the 1930s, where all of his plays including the controversialSaloméwere produced. ...