Jennifer Wallace. Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism.(Book Review)

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…