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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp. 261.
In this highly informative book, Jennifer Wallace argues that the assimilation of Hellenic classicism into British culture was a relatively late phenomenon. The excavation of Pompeii, a city founded as a Greek colony, stimulated from the mid-eighteenth century onwards a widespread interest in the factual details of the Greek way of life, and a growing demand for cultural information. Two events at the beginning of the nineteenth century heralded the institutionalization of Hellenism within the British establishment, and the supremacy of Greece over Rome as a cultural and aesthetic llmodel. Between 1801 and 1806 Lord Elgin removed all the statues from the Parthenon and shipped them back to England to improve British taste, and in 1807 Oxford introduced classical degree examinations. An appreciation of Greece and its culture was now seen as essential to the moral education of the young, as well as being an aesthetic touchstone for artists and sculptors.
This iconic appropriation of Greece, however, coincided with the tumultuous and destabilizing forces of British romanticism, whose main political thrust was a resistance to any centralized cultural image. Wallace delves into the cauldron of dissent and reaction in the period to reveal the perilous instability of a unified Hellenistic model. Images of Greece, she argues, were not natural or given, but imagined, or consciously created to serve particular interests....
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