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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.

Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that explains why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siècle poetry, the collection shows how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief. The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W. B. Yeats, who dominated the literary scene of the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson. The Fin-de-Siècle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how women poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.