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This book explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of this influential writer's reputation. In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of "gross indecency" it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. He died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss's opera Salomé and Robert Ross's edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde's name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time. In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of “gross indecency” it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome and Robert Ross’s edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde’s name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings. This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde’s value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.
Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries. Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Women’s World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright. Because of his desire to impact a mass audience, the primary elements of Wilde’s consumer aesthetic were superficial ornament and ephemeral public image – both of which he linked to the theatrical. This concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism – thus we can call Wilde’s aesthetic a consumer modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased.
A study of Oscar Wilde's Salomé in modernist and postmodernist literature and culture
The story of Oscar Wilde’s landmark 1882 American tour explains how this quotable literary eminence became famous for being famous. On January 3, 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old “genius”—at least by his own reckoning—arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made such a spectacle of himself in London with his eccentric fashion sense, acerbic wit, and extravagant passion for art and home design that Gilbert & Sullivan wrote an operetta lampooning him. He was hired to go to America to promote that work by presenting lectures on interior decorating. But Wilde had his own business plan. He would go to promote himself. And he did, traveling some 15,000 miles and visiting 150 American cities as he created a template for fame creation that still works today. Though Wilde was only the author of a self-published book of poems and an unproduced play, he presented himself as a “star,” taking the stage in satin breeches and a velvet coat with lace trim as he sang the praises of sconces and embroidered pillows—and himself. What Wilde so presciently understood is that fame could launch a career as well as cap one. David M. Friedman’s lively and often hilarious narrative whisks us across nineteenth-century America, from the mansions of Gilded Age Manhattan to roller-skating rinks in Indiana, from an opium den in San Francisco to the bottom of the Matchless silver mine in Colorado—then the richest on earth—where Wilde dined with twelve gobsmacked miners, later describing their feast to his friends in London as “First course: whiskey. Second course: whiskey. Third course: whiskey.” But, as Friedman shows, Wilde was no mere clown; he was a strategist. From his antics in London to his manipulation of the media—Wilde gave 100 interviews in America, more than anyone else in the world in 1882—he designed every move to increase his renown. There had been famous people before him, but Wilde was the first to become famous for being famous. Wilde in America is an enchanting tale of travel and transformation, comedy and capitalism—an unforgettable story that teaches us about our present as well as our past.
This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself.
Packed with new evidence, Making Oscar Wilde tells the untold story of a local Irish eccentric who became a global cultural icon. This must-read book dramatizes Oscar Wilde's remarkable rise in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Michèle Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history to reveal a life like no other.
In late 19th century England, Oscar Wilde popularized aestheticism, also known as art-for-art’s-sake – the idea that art, that beauty, should not be a vehicle for morality or truth, but an end in-and-of-itself. Rothko and Jackson Pollock enthroned the idea, creating paintings that are barely graded panels of color or wild splashes. Today, pop culture is aestheticism’s true heir, from the perfect charismatic emptiness of Ocean’s Eleven to the hyper-choreographed essentially balletic movements in the best martial arts movies. But aestheticism has a dark core, one that Social Justice Activists are now gathering to combat, revealing the damaging ideology reflected in or concealed by our most beloved pop culture icons. Taking Bryan Fuller’s television version of Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter as its main text – and taking Žižek-style illustrative detours into Malcolm in the Middle, Dark Knight Rises, Harry Potter, Interview with a Vampire, Dexter and more – this book marshals Walter Pater, Camille Paglia, Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, Kant and Plato, as well as Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Baudelaire, Beckett, Wallace Stevens and David Mamet to argue that Fuller’s show is a deceptively brilliant advance of aestheticism, both in form and content – one that investigates how deeply art-for-art’s-sake, and those of us who consciously or unconsciously worship at its teat, are necessarily entwined with evil.
Concise and illuminating articles explore Oscar Wilde's life and work in the context of the turbulent landscape of his time.
This book reads Oscar Wilde's literary texts in relation to his open support for revolutionaries, along with his expressions of solidarity with Irish republicans, anarchists, workers and migrants.