Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Victorian Hellenism - Overviews

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Frank M. Turner (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: "The Victorians and Greek Antiquity," in The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 1-14.

[In the following essay, Turner illustrates the pervasiveness of the Victorian fascination with classical Greece. Briefly tracing the history and breadth of that fascination, he focuses primarily on the various concepts of Greece that became most influential in British culture and stresses four concepts of history that undergirded the fascination.]

Throughout much of the European intellectual community of the last century there flourished an immense fascination for ancient Greece. From Goethe, Hegel, and Shelley to Kierkegaard, Arnold, Grote, and Fouillée, through Nietzsche, Fustel de Coulanges, and Frazer, the list of poets, critics, philosophers, historians, and scholars concerned at one time or another with the Greeks reads like an index of the major...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Overviews
4. The Meanings Of Hellenism
5. The Literary Influence
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Victorian Literature