The first critical analysis to embrace a wide and representative selection of John Addington Symonds's work, beyond his famous essays. It explores Symonds as a complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself, and follows his engagement with the art and literature of classical antiquity.

Shane Butler is the Hall Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, having previously taught at Penn, UCLA, and the University of Bristol. With primary interests in aesthetics and queer theory, he has published widely on classical literature and its reception, Renaissance humanism, the history of sensation, the phenomenology of reading, and the history of sexuality.

• Preface: Symonds and his Books


• Introduction: On the Surface


• 1: That One Word: Byronic Anticipations of Symonds


• 2: Dante's Mask: Photography, Tuberculosis, and Hell


• 3: Homer's Deep: Ancient Greece and Reciprocal Love


• 4: Symonds's Renaissance: Sensuous Surfaces and Hegelian Limits


• 5: Animi Figura: Symonds, Stevenson, and the Divided Self


• 6: Queer Origins: Myths of Childhood, Before Freud


• 7: Sex Scenes: Symonds in London


• 8: Queer Sensibilities: Symonds, James, Pater, and Wilde


• 9: Electric Blue: Symonds on Venice