Swinburne's the Statue of John Brute

Wrongly believed to be a parodic divertissement by the nineteenth-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, the Statue of John Brute reveals itself as a highly interesting intertextual universe where echoes from Shakespeare, the Restauration drama, Beckford, Gothic fiction and many other sources of inspiration mix together in an extremely short but explosive text.

This study anticipates its date of composition by almost twenty years - through an accurate bio-literary and corpus-stylistic analysis - thus recognising it not as a parody, but as a possible hypotext of Dorian Gray.