3-Week SASA Reading Group: “The Land Where Phoebus Never Frowned” - Graeco-Roman Resonances in the Victorian Era

The Victorians are still with us. Theirs was the period of the most radical global transformation ever seen. After them, the world was covered with railways and factories, and the unstoppable rise and spread of technology would continue into the age of Silicon Valley and the Metaverse.

Yet Victorian culture was obsessed with the classical past, as nineteenth century self-consciousness about its own moment in history, combined with an idealism focused on the glories of Greece and the splendour of Rome, ensured the ideas it produced were vastly admired and widely discussed, providing an important vehicle for critical examination of contemporary political, intellectual and social issues. The time is long past when ‘Victorian’ meant everything prudish, sentimental and conventional - with nineteenth-century scholarship now as broad as the figures who inhabited it, the picture of the empire “where the sun never sets” is more lively than ever.

This course –…