Cosmopolitan Classicism

Oscar Wilde associated ancient Greece and modern France as the homelands of artistic autonomy and personal freedom. France and the French language were crucial in his adoption of a cosmopolitan identity in which his close emotional and intellectual engagement with the ancient world also played a key role. His practices of classical reception therefore have roots in the French as well as English traditions. Wilde’s attitude towards ancient Greece initially shows the influence of French Parnassian poetry. As time goes on, however, he starts to engage with the new images of the ancient world promoted by Decadence and Symbolism, which sidelined the Greek classicism idealized by the Parnassians in favour of Hellenistic and Latin antiquity. Particularly important to Wilde were his exchanges with French Symbolist authors Marcel Schwob and Pierre Louÿs, whose writings on Hellenistic Greece are in dialogue with Wilde’s works, notably ‘The Critic as Artist’ and Salomé.