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Evangelista, Dr Stefano

Job Title: CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Trinity
Period/ Subject: Victorians

Email address: Stefano-maria.Evangelista@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

  • Nineteenth-century English literature, especially Aestheticism and Decadence
  • Comparative literature
  • Gender and sexuality
  • The classical tradition
  • Literature and visual culture

My work is situated at the intersection of English literature and a number of other disciplines, including classics, modern languages, comparative literature and the history of sexuality. Its historical focus is on the literature of the late nineteenth century, especially Aestheticism and Decadence. My first monograph, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (2009) uncovers the radical reinterpretation of Ancient Greek culture undertaken by Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Michael Field and Oscar Wilde. By bringing together male and female, canonical and marginalised authors, I sought to challenge the perception that classics was the preserve of Oxbridge-educated men, and revealed instead a plurality of modes of engagement with the past and the complex dialogue between classical scholarship, art criticism and creative writing. This book was followed by The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010), a collection of essays by leading critics, translators, theatre historians and bibliographers that brings to light for the first time the extent and nature of Wilde’s European reputation from the 1890s to the present. In the last few years I have also developed a research interest in aesthetics and particularly in the interface between literary and visual cultures. My current work is in the fields of cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange in the Victorian fin de siècle. An essay on this topic, ‘Swinburne’s Cosmopolitan Criticism’ will be published in 2012 in a volume on Swinburne that I am co-editing with Professor Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London). I am also co-editing with Dr Richard Hibbitt (University of Leeds) a themed issue of Comparative Critical Studies on the topic of 1890s cosmopolitanism, due out in 2013. I am particularly interested in patterns of cultural and literary exchange between Britain and Italy, Germany and the Scandinavian countries.

Teaching Areas:

Undergraduate: English literature from 1740 to the present, including lecture series on late-Victorian writing, and Victorian literature and the visual arts; various special authors including Oscar Wilde.

Graduate: MSt course on Aestheticism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle. I am currently supervising five doctoral theses on various aspects of English and comparative literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I would be happy to hear from prospective doctoral students planning to work on any of my research interests listed above. 

Recent Publications:

Books and Edited Volumes

  • British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, xi + 203 pp.)
  • (ed.) The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (London and New York: Continuum, 2010, cv + 381 pp.)
  • (co-ed. with Catherine Maxwell), The Arts in Victorian Literature (special issue of Yearbook of English Studies 40 (2010), xi + 325 pp.)

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

  • ‘Rome and the Romantic Imagination in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Rome and Romanticism, ed. by Tim Saunders (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

  • ‘Lessons in Greek Art: Jane Harrison and Aestheticism’, Women’s Studies 40 (2011), 513-36

  • ‘Swinburne’s Galleries’, Yearbook of English Studies 40 (2010), 160-79

  • ‘Oscar Wilde: European by Sympathy’, in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe ed. by Stefano Evangelista (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), pp.1-19

  • ‘Aesthetic Encounters: John Addington Symonds and Wilhelm Von Gloeden’, in Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture, ed. by Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp.87-104

  • ‘Vernon Lee in the Vatican: The Uneasy Alliance of Aestheticism and Archaeology’, Victorian Studies 52 (2009), 25-35

  • 'A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater’s Iconography of Dionysus’, Victorian Review 34 (2008), 200-18

  • ‘Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater’, in Children and Sexuality: The Greeks to the Great War, ed. by George Rousseau (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.206-30

  • ‘Walter Pater’s Teaching in Oxford: Classics and Aestheticism’, in Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800-2000, ed. by Christopher Stray (London: Duckworth, 2007), pp.64-77

  • ‘Walter Pater: The Queer Reception’, Pater Newsletter 52 (2007), 19-24

  • ‘A Colony of Hellas: Nineteenth-Century England and the Legacy of Ancient Greece’, Journal of British Cultures 13 (2006), 47-62

  • ‘“Lovers and Philosophers in One”: Aesthetic Platonism in the Victorian Fin de Siècle’, Yearbook of English Studies 36 (2006), 230-44

  • ‘Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism’, in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.91-111

  • ‘The German Roots of British Aestheticism: Pater’s “Winckelmann”, Goethe’s Winckelmann, Pater’s Goethe’, in Anglo-German Affinities and Antipathies in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Rüdiger Görner (Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 2004), pp.57-70

  • ‘Walter Pater Unmasked: Impressionistic Criticism and the Gender of Aesthetic Writing’, Literature Compass 1 (2004), 1-4

  • ‘Against Misinterpretation: Benjamin Jowett’s Translations of Plato and the Ethics of Modern Homosexuality’, Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines 36 (2003), 141-53

  • ‘Outward Nature and the Moods of Men: Pater’s Romantic Mythology’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. by Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2002), pp.107-18

Other Information:

I am a convenor of the Victorian Literature Graduate Seminar, which meets on Mondays at 5.15 during term.

I am on the editorial boards of the following journals:

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