Description
Book SynopsisDowling offers the first detailed account of Oxford Hellenism, the Victorian philosophical and literary movement that anticipated the modern possibility of homosexuality as a positive social identity.
Trade ReviewAn exceptionally clear-headed and far-reaching analysis.... Beautifully written and argued with subtlety, the book is indispensable for students of Victorian literature, culture, gender studies, and the nature of social change.
* Choice *
Dowling's compact and intelligently argued study is concerned with the late-Victorian emergence of homosexuality as an identity rather than as an activity.... This identity was formed out of notions of Hellenism current in mid-century Oxford that were held to be lofty and ennobling and even a kind of substitute for a waning Christianity.
* Nineteenth-Century Literature *
This book presents a detailed and knowledgeable account of such factors as the Oxford Movement and the influence of such Victorian dons as Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater and the evolving evaluations of Classical Greece, its mores and morals. It is also enhanced by an analysis of Greek terminology with homosexual connotations, as to be found, for instance, in Plato.
* Lambda Book Report *
Table of ContentsPreface1. Aesthete and Effeminatus
2. Victorian Manhood and the Warrior Ideal
3. The Socratic Eros
4. The Higher Sodomy
Works Cited
Index
