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  • Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity by Simon Goldhill
  • Jonah Siegel (bio)
Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity, by Simon Goldhill; pp. viii + 352. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, $45.00.

Years ago I came across John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) reproduced in mosaic over a bathtub in Brooklyn, where its more than faint suggestiveness and patent erudition were evidently taken to complement the Louis XVI decorative scheme deployed elsewhere in the house. There was something at once appropriate and embarrassing about the choice. It is Simon Goldhill’s achievement that he helps to clarify the kinds of feelings Waterhouse is likely to provoke today by illuminating those he evoked in his own day through the combination of learning and eroticism that characterizes his canvases and lent them a long life in the popular arena even when they were disdained by more educated taste.

This wonderfully wide-ranging book started life as a lecture series at Oberlin College, and one can only envy the time the undergraduates spent listening to so erudite, imaginative, and lucid a thinker engaging with such a range of important topics. The volume deserves to find a wide audience, and it will provide a stimulating resource for students of the place of the classics in the Victorian era, in particular of the intersection of religion and classical antiquity in the cultural imaginary of the period.

Goldhill presents a set of deeply learned and extensively developed case studies, moving from the reception of Waterhouse, to the place of Sappho in Victorian painting, to the significance of the classics in the response to Christoph Willibald Gluck and Richard Wagner, and concluding with a long section on novels set in antiquity. While the book does not trace one argumentative line, notable continuities link the wide-ranging instances, chief among them the place of Victorian responses to desire and of the interplay of religious faith and historical fantasies of Christianity in the reception of classical antiquity.

By addressing a long swathe of history, Goldhill is able to remind us that in the early nineteenth century classical antiquity was more likely to be associated with progressive, and even revolutionary, politics than with reactionary triumphalist imperialism. Similarly, his identification of the sexual energy present in responses to the classics throughout the century allows a topic typically associated with the late Victorian period to emerge with renewed force and clarity, not to say historical accuracy.

Studies of cultural transmission are seldom able to do justice to its complexity and richness. It is precisely in its unwillingness to simplify that the book’s contribution to reception studies shades into its methodological contribution to the study of culture more generally. As Goldhill writes: “reception should be seen as a variegated and conflictual space of engagement rather than a neatly bounded moment of comprehension” (52). Reception in this study is not a matter of one great mind communicating with another across time, but of a network of constantly revised and contested responses to a whole continuum of influences, hence Goldhill’s emphasis on reviews and theatrical productions.

The interplay of high culture and low in the reception of classics and the place of religious thought in shaping Victorian responses to antiquity have seldom been so fully laid out. The special virtues of Goldhill’s work emerge in his treatment of the intersection of trends and developments often kept apart, in part because he is [End Page 529] willing to take on the challenge of writing about the vicissitudes of half-knowledge, partial information, and incoherent politics.

The chapters on opera are as impressive as the rest, and engage with a topic of profound interest to a great many Victorian authors, but which has yet to receive its due in Victorian studies. The treatment of Gluck and Hector Berlioz uses production decisions and discussions in the press as well as texts by the composers themselves to illuminate the complex and multifaceted nature of the reception of classical culture in the nineteenth century. The chapter on Wagner, while extraordinarily rich in detail, might be less surprising in its...

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