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 consequences
of Oxford University reform. Through their search in Plato and
Greek literature for a transcendental value that might substitute
for a lost Christian theology, such liberal reformers as Benjamin
Jowett unintentionally created a cultural context in which male
love the "spiritual procreancy" celebrated in Plato's Symposium
might be both experienced and justified in ideal terms. Dowling
traces the institutional career of Hellenism from its roots in
Oxford reform through its blossoming in an approach to Greek
studies that came to operate as a code for homosexuality.
Recreating the incidents, controversies, and scandals that heralded
the growth of Hellenism, Dowling provides a new cultural and
theoretical context within which to read writers as diverse as
Wilde, Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, Lord Alfred
Douglas, Robert Buchanan, and W. H. Mallock."
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