ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the varied receptions of Greek material culture in English literature and literary culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It looks at the effect of the Parthenon marbles arriving in London, and the way in which they disturbed or complicated the Winckelmannian idea of Greek art (Keats and Hazlitt are interesting witnesses here). It discusses the literary response to Greek architecture and Greek Revival architecture, and the relationship between these two. Other themes included in this chapter are George Eliot’s use of Greek art in her novels and Ruskin’s wrestle with the nature of Greek sculpture and architecture, as well as the Hellenism of the aesthetes in the later nineteenth century, Pater especially. Concerning the twentieth century, the chapter examines the reaction against Greek art, or against a certain understanding of Greek art, and the entangled mixture of these two responses. Forster and MacNeice are among the twentieth-century writers discussed, and also included are classical scholars with a public reach, such as Murray and Dodds.
