Skip to content

Opening book details…

Can I read Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s on EtoBox?

Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s by Linda C. Dowling, Linda C. Dowling is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s about?

In April 1895, Oscar Wilde stood in the prisoner's dock of the Old Bailey, charged with "acts of gross indecency with another male person. These filthy practices, the prosecutor declared, posed a deadly threat to English society, "a sore which cannot fail in time to corrupt and taint it all." Wilde responded with a speech of legendary eloquence, defending love between men as a love "such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare." Electrified, the spectators in the courtroom burst into applause.Although Wilde was ultimately imprisoned, the courtroom response to his speech signaled a revolutionary moment—the emergence into the public sphere of a kind of love that had always been proscribed in English culture. In this luminous work of intellectual history, Linda Dowling offers the first detailed account of Oxford Hellenism, the Victorian philosophical and literary movement that made possible Wilde's brief triumph and anticipated the modern possibility of homosexuality as a positive social identity.A homosocial culture and a language of moral legitimacy for homosexuality emerged, Dowling argues, as unforeseen co

Who reads Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s?

It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.

Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.

Author
Linda C. Dowling, Linda C. Dowling
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Published
1994
Language
EN
ISBN
9780801481703
Category
history
Subjects
Literary Criticism, Science, Language Learning
Updated
2026-03-24

Other editions & translations

More by Linda C. Dowling, Linda C. Dowling

Browse all works by Linda C. Dowling, Linda C. Dowling

Similar books