Author: Joseph Bristow Publisher: Ohio University Press ISBN: 0821443038 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
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.
Author: S. Salamensky Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137011882 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
Salamensky investigates Oscar Wilde, his contemporaries, and the public frenzy over his work and life as illustrating the crucial importance of performance in the construction of the 'modern' and our own, postmodern, lives.
Author: Uwe Böker Publisher: Rodopi ISBN: 9789042014008 Category : Authors, Irish Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
The present collection of essays is the outcome of the Oscar Wilde conference held at the Technical University of Dresden, 31 August - 3 September 2000. The papers cover a wide range of historical and comparative aspects: they look into the status of Wilde as poet, dramatist, essayist and intellectual during his own times as well as investigate the meaning of his work for subsequent writers and critics, thus, giving an outline of the Wildean history of literary reception, intellectual discourse and media transformation. Intellectually brilliant and challenging, Oscar Wilde had been a favourite of the late Victorians, performing the roles of the dandy and the poet of art for art's sake. However, due to his questioning of prevalent moral double standards and his insistence on the autonomy of art, he was indicted for gross indecencies, convicted, and sent to prison. Instead of being ostracised, he became a source of inspiration for writers and artists on the British isles as well as on the European continent. The papers in this volume explore such topics as Wilde's concepts of socialism and aestheticism, his fashioning of the femme fatale and of the dandy, his use of fashion and of simulation, his impact on modernism and postmodernism as well as on genres such as crime writing and fictional biography, and the influence of Wilde on writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Joe Orton, Peter Ackroyd, Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Mark Ravenhill. Other papers focus on the reception of Wilde in Russia, former Yugoslavia, Hungary and Germany as well as on cinematic and Internet representations of Wilde. Critical and creative responses vary from the general to the specific - from traditional assessments to analyses of the arts of camp, parody, and pastiche; thus, indicative of the (sub)cultural appropriation of 'Saint Oscar' (Terry Eagleton).
Author: David M. Friedman Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393245918 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
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.
Author: Paul Fortunato Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135860955 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
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.
Author: Joseph Bristow Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: 9783319868585 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This is the first collection of critical essays that explores Oscar Wilde’s interest in children’s culture, whether in relation to his famous fairy stories, his life as a caring father to two small boys, his place as a defender of children’s rights within the prison system, his fascination with youthful beauty, and his theological contemplation of what it means to be a child in the eyes of God. The collection also examines the ways in which Wilde’s works—not just his fairy stories—have been adapted for young audiences.
Author: Michele Mendelssohn Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748697543 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
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.
Author: Pierpaolo Martino Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3031304268 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
WILDE NOWreads Oscar Wilde through our now, through a contemporary sensibility (and approach), in which literature and popular culture interrogate and are interrogated by critical concepts and categories such as performance, celebrity, intermediality, and consumerism. This volume exceeds the shape and meaning of a critical study to turn into a drama of five different acts/moments in Wilde’s life and work: his early performances in Dublin, London and Oxford; the 1882 American tour; his successful season of the first half of the 1890s, his prison years and finally his glorious resurrection in contemporary pop culture. Most importantly WILDE NOW approaches these moments through contemporary rewritings and performances of “Oscar Wilde” in the fields of cinema, music and literature by such artists as Al Pacino, Rupert Everett, Stephen Fry, Gyles Brandreth, David Hare, David Bowie, Morrissey, Nick Cave, Neil Tennant, Gavin Friday. These artists – through their awareness of the importance of being/playing Oscar in their specific worlds and cultural contexts – will also show us that Wilde can be conceived as a subversive, critical role one might successfully perform and appropriate, now more than ever.
Author: Joseph Bristow
Author: Petra Dierkes-Thrun
Author: S. Salamensky
Author: Iain Ross
Author: Uwe Böker
Author: David M. Friedman
Author: Paul Fortunato
Author: Joseph Bristow
Author: Michele Mendelssohn
Author: Pierpaolo Martino