Essays on Oscar Wilde

BOOK REVIEWS of cultural "fusion" which McBratney sees as being, in the end, unambiguously disavowed at the thematic level. While McBratney adduces the novels of T. N. Murari in support of his interpretation of Kim, he neglects to mention a host of other revisions of Kim by contemporary writers of Indian origin which would seem to support the inference that Kim is finally concerned with stressing its protagonist 's unresolved conflict over his cultural affiliations. It is certainly hard to understand why a range of post-independence writers from G. V. Desani and Salman Rushdie to I. Allan Sealey and Hari Kunzru would want to use Kim as a template if the text was simply, in the end, an uncomplicated affirmation of the superiority of British culture. None of them seem to be interested in Hurree Chunder, rather than Kim, as a model for their own protagonists—even if it is true, as McBratney suggests in a fine passage, that Kipling endows the Bengali, too, with a radically "ethnographic" capacity for "self-fashioning." Other queries suggest themselves. For example, one wonders why, if Kipling was so convinced that the native-born represented the best future for the British Empire as a whole, he wrote directly only about the Indian variety, especially as Kipling became progressively disillusioned with the turn of events in India after he had left for England. After all, Kipling lived for some time in South Africa, where "settler colonialism" flourished to a degree unimaginable in India, and was an admiring visitor to Canada. Yet the "true" white imperial Creole barely features in his imaginative writing. It is a pity, too, that while McBratney persuasively discusses the figure of Kadmiel in Kipling's mythological historiography of Britain, he does not have space for an engagement with Kipling's views of the Jews of India, another "Creole" formation which has some interesting implications for the fiction of the Indian native-born on which McBratney concentrates. Such queries do not, however, detract from the achievement oÃ- Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space. It is likely to prove to be required reading for students of Kipling's imperial fiction. BART MOORE-GILBERT Goldsmiths College, University of London Essays on Oscar Wilde Joseph Bristow, ed. Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth -Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, 2003. xi + 334 pp. $60.00 103 ELT 47 : 1 2004 THIS ANTHOLOGY OF ESSAYS was selected from lectures delivered at four conferences in 1999 on "Oscar Wilde and the Culture of the Fin de Siècle" at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles . The book jacket blurb announces that this "provocative and ground-breaking volume examines Oscar Wilde's achievements as an aesthete, critic, dramatist, novelist, and poet, and ushers the field of Wilde studies into the twenty-first century." The leading essay following Bristow's is by John Stokes, whose essay on Wilde and the theatrical journalism in the 1880s alludes to Wilde's "modernity," but Stokes says little about the significance of the term. He devotes much space to the Dramatic Review, which published several of Wilde's articles and reviews. The periodical also published writings of William Archer (a noted translator of Ibsen), Clement Scott (an attacker of Ibsen), and Bernard Shaw (a reviewer of such works as The Mikado and A Doll's House). Stokes dwells on the editor of the Dramatic Review, Edwin Paget Palmer, who seems to have had a "direct connection" with Wilde but only a note from Oscar has survived. In her essay on "The Soul of Man under Socialism," Josephine M. Guy establishes a context for Wilde's essay by discussing Frank Harris's editorship oÃ- Fortnightly Review. When urging Wilde to submit an essay to the journal, Harris specified "an Article on Literature or any Social Subject as paradoxical as you please." Wilde's essay turned out to be not only paradoxical but also somewhat incoherent: a radical tour de force, the essay focuses on such topics as the artist's status, Socialism, Individualism , and Anarchism (terms capitalized by Wilde). Wilde's utopia is ideal for...