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Podcast: New Books in Italian Studies
Episode: Laura Eastlake, "Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Description: Laura Eastlake’s Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature were at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire. These manifold and often contradictory representations were used as vehicles equally to capture the martial virtue of Wellington and to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde.In the works of Thomas Macaulay, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Ri...