Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood PDF Download

Author: Joseph Bristow
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319604112
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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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: Joseph Bristow
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821443038
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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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: Jarlath Killeen
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0754687546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Oscar Wilde's two collections of children's literature, The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), have often been relegated to the margins in studies of his work. In this, the first full-length study of Wilde's fairy tales, Jarlath Killeen resituates the collections in a complex nexus of theological, political, social, and national concerns and restores the tales to their proper place in the Wilde canon.

Author: Joseph Bristow
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300268432
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description
The most authoritative account of a pivotal event in legal and cultural history: the trials of Oscar Wilde on charges of “gross indecency” Among the most infamous prosecutions of a literary figure in history, the two trials of Oscar Wilde for committing acts of “gross indecency” occurred at the height of his fame. After being found guilty, Wilde spent two years in prison, emerged bankrupt, and died in a cheap hotel room in Paris a few years after his release. The trials prompted a new intolerance toward homosexuality: habits of male bonding that were previously seen as innocent were now viewed as a threat, and an association grew in the public mind between gay men and the arts. Oscar Wilde on Trial assembles accounts from a variety of sources, including official and private letters, newspaper accounts, and previously published (but very incomplete) transcripts, to provide the most accurate and authoritative account to date of events that were pivotal in both legal and cultural history.

Author: Frederick D. King
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399525964
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Queer books, like LGBTQ+ people, adapt heteronormative structures and institutions to introduce space for discourses of queer desire. Queer Books of Late-Victorian Print Culture explores print culture adaptations of the material book, examining the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Michael Field, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Oscar Wilde. It closely analyses the material book, including the elements of binding, typography, paper, ink and illustration, and brings textual studies and queer theory into conversation with literary experiments in free verse, fairy tales and symbolist drama. King argues that queer authors and artists revised the Revival of Printing's ideals for their own diverse and unique desires, adapting new technological innovations in print culture. Their books created a community of like-minded aesthetes who challenged legal and representational discourses of same-sex desire with one of aesthetic sensuality.

Author: Oscar Wilde
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248678
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
An innovative new edition of nine classic short stories from one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era. “I cannot think other than in stories,” Oscar Wilde once confessed to his friend André Gide. In this new selection of his short fiction, Wilde’s gifts as a storyteller are on full display, accompanied by informative facing-page annotations from Wilde biographer and scholar Nicholas Frankel. A wide-ranging introduction brings readers into the world from which the author drew inspiration. Each story in the collection brims with Wilde’s trademark wit, style, and sharp social criticism. Many are reputed to have been written for children, although Wilde insisted this was not true and that his stories would appeal to all “those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” stands alongside Wilde’s comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, while other stories—including “The Happy Prince,” the tale of a young ruler who had never known sorrow, and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the story of a nightingale who sacrifices herself for true love—embrace the theme of tragic, forbidden love and are driven by an undercurrent of seriousness, even despair, at the repressive social and sexual values of Wilde’s day. Like his later writings, Wilde’s stories are a sweeping indictment of the society that would imprison him for his homosexuality in 1895, five years before his death at the age of forty-six. Published here in the form in which Victorian readers first encountered them, Wilde’s short stories contain much that appeals to modern readers of vastly different ages and temperaments. They are the perfect distillation of one of the Victorian era’s most remarkable writers.

Author: Annette M. Magid
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443865974
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century is a collection of essays which celebrates the diversity of Oscar Wilde’s genius. This unique collection of scholarship explores not only his influence on a broad spectrum of subjects including: aesthetics, children’s literature, women’s issues, consumer economics, queer theory, politics, theater, film, poetry, Victorianism and other aspects of culture such as pedagogical approaches to Wilde’s literature, but it also examines the influence of his family and friends on him. Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century includes a wide range of approaches and concentrations written by international experts and has a broad spectrum of subjects which will appeal to a diversity of scholars seeking original and alternative approaches to understanding Oscar Wilde. The multiplicity of interest in the topic of Oscar Wilde expands across genres, disciplines, cultures and time, this being the second century of Wilde scholarship since his untimely death in November 1900 preceding the fin-de siècle. The unique, multi-discipline approach of Wilde’s Wiles is organized in three sections: “Aesthetic Approaches,” “Friends and Family,” and “Performance and Pedagogy” and bridges philosophical, sociological, psychological, economic and literary disciplines.

Author: Monica Flegel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319722751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.

Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429018177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 714

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

Author: Kevin A. Morrison
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476633592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
 This companion to Victorian popular fiction includes more than 300 cross-referenced entries on works written for the British mass market. Biographical sketches cover the writers and their publishers, the topics that concerned them and the genres they helped to establish or refine. Entries introduce readers to long-overlooked authors who were widely read in their time, with suggestions for further reading and emerging resources for the study of popular fiction.