Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece
Iain Ross
Cambridge University Press
<span>From his boyhood Oscar Wilde was haunted by the literature and  culture of ancient Greece, but until now no full-length study has  considered in detail the texts, institutions and landscapes through  which he imagined Greece. The archaeology of Celtic Ireland, explored by  the young Wilde on excavations with his father, informed both his  encounter with the archaeology of Greece and his conviction that Celt  and Greek shared a hereditary aesthetic sensibility, while major works  such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest  maintain a dynamic, creative relationship with originary texts such as  Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's dialogues and the then lost comedies of  Menander. Drawing on unpublished archival material, Oscar Wilde and  Ancient Greece offers a new portrait of a writer whose work embodies  both the late nineteenth-century conflict between literary and material  antiquity and his own contradictory impulses towards Hellenist form and  the formlessness of desire.</span>