Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions

Opening with an introduction by Joseph Bristow and featuring thirteen original essays that examine Wilde’s achievements as an aesthete, critic, dramatist, novelist, and poet, this provocative and ground-breaking volume ushers the field of Oscar Wilde studies into the twenty-first century. The contributors focus on three neglected areas of Wilde criticism - textual editing, the production and dissemination of Wilde’s dramas, and the situating of Wilde’s writings in cultural, political and social contexts - and cast fresh light on topics that include Wilde’s early dramatic criticism, his engagement with socialist thought, his groundbreaking editorship of The Woman’s World, and the relation of his plays to late-Victorian feminism and homosexual blackmail.

WildeWritings brings together research by established and emergent scholars, some of whom draw on unpublished archival material, and all of whom have something fresh to say about Wilde. The collection provides new interventions into urgent critical debates about Wilde and effeminacy, masochism, and Christian theology, and draws attention to significant problems in the textual edition of Wilde’s divergent canon of writing, his debt to the ‘aesthetic’ fiction of the popular novelist Ouida, and the transmission of his drama in twentieth-century China.

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.