Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture : The Making of a Legend

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, Lady Gregory, and late-Victorian table-talk / Lucy McDiarmid -- Sexuality in the age of technological reproducibility: Oscar Wilde, photography, and identity / Daniel A. Novak -- Salomé as bombshell, or, How Oscar Wilde became an anarchist / Erin Williams Hyman -- Oscar Wilde and the politics of posthumous sainthood: Hofmannsthal, Mirbeau, Proust / Richard A. Kaye -- The trouble with Oskar: Wilde's legacy for the early homosexual rights movement in Germany / Yvonne Ivory -- Staking Salomé: the literary forefathers and choreographic daughters of Oscar Wilde's "Hysterical and perverted creature" / Julie Townsend -- "Surely you are not claiming to be more homosexual than I?" Claude Cahun and Oscar Wilde / Lizzie Thynne -- Oscar Wilde's An ideal husband and W. Somerset Maugham's The constant wife: a dialogue / Laurel Brake -- Transcripts and truth: writing the trials of Oscar Wilde / Leslie J. Moran -- The artist as protagonist: Wilde on stage / Francesca Coppa -- Wilde lives: Derek Jarman and the queer eighties / Matt Cook -- Oscar goes to Hollywood: Wilde, sexuality, and the gaze of contemporary cinema / Oliver S. Buckton The contributors explore 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.