Archéologie textuelle grecque et épigraphe érotique chez Simeon Solomon et Michael Field

Victorian literature and archaeology: Contemporary excavations

“…While Linda Dowling's () Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford does not deal directly with archaeology, this text firmly establishes the ways in which Victorian writers found in the ancient past ample opportunity to express radical sexual possibilities in the modern world. In addition to Dowling's work, Stefano Evangelista's British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (Evangelista, ) and “Greek Textual Archaeology and Erotic Epigraphy in Simeon Solomon and Michael Field” (Evangelista, ) and Iain Ross's () Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece address archaeology's influence on fin‐de‐siècle British aestheticism and queer writers like Wilde, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], and Michael Field [Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley]. Much of this scholarship examines how the ancient Greek practice of pederasty—an erotic and intellectual relationship between an older man and a younger man, “the prime form of attachment in Greek homosexuality”—was uncovered through classical studies and explored by writers, publicly or privately (Evangelista, , para.…”

“…For example, Michael Field's () Long Ago , a collection of poems celebrating female homoeroticism, was inspired by fragments of Sapphic poetry (which appear as epigraphs for each poem). The epigraphs and poems are bound in a decorated book, which is in Evangelista's () words, an “archaeological intertext” (n. 20). “[T]he relationship between the modern lyric and its ancient source,” he explains, “is not so much mediated through philology or textual scholarship as through an experimental form of textual archaeology” (Evangelista, , n. 20).…”

“…The epigraphs and poems are bound in a decorated book, which is in Evangelista's () words, an “archaeological intertext” (n. 20). “[T]he relationship between the modern lyric and its ancient source,” he explains, “is not so much mediated through philology or textual scholarship as through an experimental form of textual archaeology” (Evangelista, , n. 20). Archaeology thus offered not only historical examples of homoeroticism for Victorian writers to explore in their own century, but its methodologies offered ways of experiencing the past that subvert heteronormative strictures.…”