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8 books match the query 'Wilde, Oscar'

cover of A THOUSAND WORDS: PORTRAITURE, STYLE, AND QUEER MODERNISM

A THOUSAND WORDS

PORTRAITURE, STYLE, AND QUEER MODERNISM

Jaime Hovey

The Ohio State University Press, 2006

A Thousand Words argues that there is such a thing as queer modernism, and that the (mostly) literary portrait—one of the more prominent forms of experimentalism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writing—functions as one of its most important erotically dynamic aesthetic mechanisms, one modeled on visual portraiture’s relationships of looking between the artists, sitters, and spectators of paintings. Jaime Hovey looks at how the dynamic structure of visual portraiture was appropriated by modernist writers—including Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Colette, among others, who used the self-conscious literary portrait.

Portraiture speaks to the complex relationship between identity, sexuality, and art, and the presence of so many portraits in this era suggests that sexual, gender, and racial aspects of character, personality, and personal identity were of major concern to most modernist writers. Yet it took most of the twentieth century for critical work to appear that meaningfully explored these themes, and very little has been said about the queerness of literary portraiture. This book demonstrates that literary portraiture is enamored of its own self-consciousness, with the pleasures of looking at itself seeing itself, and that its texts circulate this pleasure between writers, narrators and other characters, and readers as a perverse aesthetics
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cover of Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde To David Bowie

Aesthetics of Self-Invention

Oscar Wilde To David Bowie

Shelton Waldrep

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Traces the influence of Oscar Wilde as the precursor of twentieth-century artists of self-performance

By printing the title “Professor of Aesthetics” on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation—and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde’s life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized performers: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde’s fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century’s cultural producers who would blend works of both “high art” and mass-market appeal.

Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed.
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cover of Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture

The Making of a Legend

Joseph Bristow

Ohio University Press, 2009

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.

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cover of Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews

Oscar Wilde in America

The Interviews

Edited by Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.
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cover of Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books

Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books

Nicholas Frankel

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books addresses Wilde's obsession with the visual appearance or "look" of his published writings. It examines the role played by graphic designers in the production of Wilde's writings and demonstrates how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Nicholas Frankel approaches Wilde's writings as graphical or "printed" phenomena that reveal their significance through the beautiful and elaborate decorations with which they were published in Wilde's own lifetime. With extensive reference to and exposition on Wilde's theoretical writings and letters, the author shows that, far from being marginal elements of the literary text, these decorative devices were central to Wilde's understanding of his own writings as well as to his "aesthetic" theory of language. Extensive illustrations support Frankel's arguments. The first part of the book lays out a broadly historical view of Wilde’s writings, emphasizing their volatility at the hands of time as well as Wilde’s changing conceptions of his own work. The second part demonstrates the significance that Wilde and his publishers attached to the process of graphic design, showing how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Both parts stress the importance of late-Victorian publishing practices to our understanding of Wilde’s writings. The book further challenges the prevailing view of Wilde as essentially a playwright, demonstrating the importance of poetry to Wilde’s own understanding of himself as an author.The book attempts to do justice to Wilde’s own valorization of literature as one of the decorative arts. By emphasizing the visual and collaborative dimensions of Wilde’s texts, Frankel argues that visual decoration was central to Wilde’s theory of language as well as his practice as a writer. Anticipating Baudrillard's distinctionbetween appearance and the transparency, of the sign, Wilde’s writings argue that literary language is both a visual and a material phenomenon — what Wilde himself would call a “beautiful untrue thing” — that demands to be read with the eye as much as the brain.This book will appeal to specialists of Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle, to textual and literary scholars, art historians, and linguistic philosophers interested in the graphical nature of the linguistic sign.
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cover of Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression

Salome's Modernity

Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression

Petra Dierkes-Thrun

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salomé has had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression is the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism and Salomé as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salomé marks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde and Salomé are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarmé, Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.

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cover of The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde

The Artist as Critic

Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

University of Chicago Press, 1982

Although known primarily as the irreverent but dazzlingly witty playwright who penned The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde was also an able and farsighted critic. He was an early advocate of criticism as an independent branch of literature and stressed its vital role in the creative process. Scholars continue to debate many of Wilde's critical positions.

Included in Richard Ellmann's impressive collection of Wilde's criticism, The Artist as Critic, is a wide selection of Wilde's book reviews as well as such famous longer works as "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.," "The Soul Man under Socialism," and the four essays which make up Intentions. The Artist as Critic will satisfy any Wilde fan's yearning for an essential reading of his critical work.

"Wilde . . . emerges now as not only brilliant but also revolutionary, one of the great thinkers of dangerous thoughts."—Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review

"The best of Wilde's nonfictional prose can be found in The Artist as Critic."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
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cover of Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman

Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman

Dominic Janes

University of Chicago Press, 2015

With all the heated debates around religion and homosexuality today, it might be hard to see the two as anything but antagonistic. But in this book, Dominic Janes reveals the opposite: Catholic forms of Christianity, he explains, played a key role in the evolution of the culture and visual expression of homosexuality and male same-sex desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He explores this relationship through the idea of queer martyrdom—closeted queer servitude to Christ—a concept that allowed a certain degree of latitude for the development of same-sex desire.
            Janes finds the beginnings of queer martyrdom in the nineteenth-century Church of England and the controversies over Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sexuality. He then considers how liturgical expression of queer desire in the Victorian Eucharist provided inspiration for artists looking to communicate their own feelings of sexual deviance. After looking at Victorian monasteries as queer families, he analyzes how the Biblical story of David and Jonathan could be used to create forms of same-sex partnerships. Finally, he delves into how artists and writers employed ecclesiastical material culture to further queer self-expression, concluding with studies of Oscar Wilde and Derek Jarman that illustrate both the limitations and ongoing significance of Christianity as an inspiration for expressions of homoerotic desire.
Providing historical context to help us reevaluate the current furor over homosexuality in the Church, this fascinating book brings to light the myriad ways that modern churches and openly gay men and women can learn from the wealth of each other’s cultural and spiritual experience.
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