CLASS 3642

Victorian Greeks and Romans

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023.

Greece and Rome, refracted in nineteenth-century writers, composers, and painters, including: Plautus, re-made by Oscar Wilde; Aristophanic Comedy, Bowdlerized by Bowdler, de-Bowdlerized by Gilbert, Irished by Sullivan, represented by D'Oyly Carte as a caricature of what it caricatured; scientific poetry, abandoned for prose: Lucretius to the Darwins; myth, gothicized by pre-Raphaelites, rivalled musically by Germans; Virgil's Aeneid, construed as justifying usurped monarchy that was masked as a restored republic, to parallel Britain's powerless monarchy masking imperial oligarchy; Byron's "real" Greece yielding to idealized Hellas as Greeks were taught that freedom required "Hellenic" not "Romaic" identity and a German king.

When Offered Spring.

Breadth Requirement (HB)
Distribution Category (ALC-AS, HST-AS, LA-AS)

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