Modernist Writers, Classical Ideal and Empire

Abstract

Victorian Hellenism, as argued previously, was multiple and fraught with tensions and contradictions, so, too, was modernist Hellenism. Just as the Victorians invested ancient Greek myths, symbols and figures to achieve their own artistic and ideological goals, modernist Hellenists took from ancient Greece what suited their own concerns (Gregory 1997). Modernist writers such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Albert Camus, who will be studied throughout, showed great admiration for classical literatures and cultures. They borrowed myths, themes and ideas from ancient authors which they used to various artistic and ideological purposes. Their attitude to classical legacy varied from one writer to another, but they all had an idealised image of Greece. Most modernist writers, as will become clear, tended to reproduce in their fiction the nineteenth-century stereotyped view of Greece as a place of moderation, artistic nobility and political and human accomplishment. Apart from Ezra Pound who once referred to the ancient Greeks’ ‘disreputable vices’ — the ‘vices’ in question being Greek homosexuality — modernist writers remained silent or evasive about the ancient society’s bleak sides.