The Horror and the Glory: Euripides Among the Victorians

This dissertation explores the literary and cultural impact of Euripides in the long nineteenth century. The project tests Victorian theories of translation and appropriation against a diverse array of media (including poetry, prose, drama, non-fiction, and Pre-Raphaelite art) in multiple European languages (primarily English and ancient Greek, but also Latin, German, Italian, and French). Emphasizing ancient texts in their original languages, I examine how a wide array of Victorians (including Matthew Arnold, J. M. Barrie, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Jane Harrison, Walter Pater, Frederick Sandys, Bram Stoker, J. A. Symonds, R. Y. Tyrrell, A. W. Verrall, Augusta Webster, and Oscar Wilde) engage with Euripidean tragedy to express the perceived tribulations and monstrosities of their rapidly changing era. Three of Euripides’s most widely read tragedies form the centre of the analysis, Bacchae, Medea, and Hippolytus, all of which are underpinned by Euripides’s associations with the god Dionysus. Although Ernst Behler’s 1986 article persuasively claimed a “nineteenth century damnatio of Euripides,” I argue that Euripidean texts were nevertheless widely read, translated, and appropriated into Victorian literature as a vehicle through which writers expressed ideas about aspects of ancient Greece antithetical to Matthew Arnold’s more popular notions of its “sweetness and light.” Through a theoretical framework inspired by Bakhtin, Foucault, Burkert, and Sedgwick, I analyze ancient and Victorian discursive formations; the material conditions of Victorian life, which prompt identification with Euripidean drama; and the socio-political institutions which Euripidean-inflected Victorian texts critique.