Wilde's Shorter Fiction

30:2, Reviews Salmon's book is a necessary, if in some ways disappointing, addition to the scholarship on Granville-Barker. If one can get through the subjective editorializing, and find a strategy for using the peculiar division of the letters, one can hear the incisive, sometimes romantic, and almost always practical voice of Harley Granville-Barker. Bruce Henderson _______________________________________Kearney State College___________ WILDE'S SHORTER FICTION Oscar Wilde. Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited and Introduced by Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Paper $3.95 Studies dedicated to Oscar Wilde generally fall into two categories of scholarly enterprise. The foremost is biographical, an approach which rose to prominence during Wilde's remarkable life and continues to pervade the work done on him today. Editorial projects such as Isobel Munay's relatively recent edition of Wilde's shorter fiction comprise the second. It is to her credit that she gently reminds her readers of a third category, namely textually-centred criticism of his writings, which remains, she implies, a largely unexplored territory in the field of Wilde studies: "the reading public has never ceased to demand his stories, and yet the critics have for the most part paid them very little attention, although story-telling was so fundamental an activity throughout his life" (1). This perceptive distinction between the public's affection for the stories and the paucity of critical attention they have received points to the difficulty of establishing an appropriate context for evaluating Professor Munay's achievement. Who is her audience, the reading public or Wilde's critics? The former would seem the more likely response for several reasons. The book is published as part of Oxford University Press's "The World's Classics" series, so it is both inexpensive and widely accessible (Munay also edited TAe Picture of Dorian Gray in the Oxford English Novel series). The format appears to be directed to the general reader: the introduction includes a minibiography and mini-critiques of the works included. The texts of the stories are uncluttered with footnotes; instead she provides end notes, most of which are explanations of obscure or foreign terms. Most importantly, all of Wilde's shorter fiction has been included, from Lord Arthur Sovile's Crime and Other Stories (published collectively in 1891 but separately in journals of 1887) to Poems in Prose (1894). Munay has wisely attempted to anange them chronologically, not generically or thematically; this decision benefits the casual reader and specialist alike for it allows either to trace Wilde's development as he worked in the shorter prose forms. 239 30:2, Reviews Yet her chronological anangement is suspect and tempts the Wilde critic to hunt for other defects that this edition may contain. The desire to anange the works chronologically is admirable, but her rationale for doing so is potentially self-defeating. She follows the original order of composition but not the original texts, preferring instead "the last printed edition Wilde was able to supervise" (18). How problematic this rational is depends on one's preference for one school of editorial thought over another. Put crudely, which is the more valid, the earlier or later authorised version of a given text? The answer in this case depends in tum on one's purposes in approaching any or all of the Wildean "canon." Munay cannot be blamed for becoming involved in such unavoidable and thorny problems, but she may be questioned on her decision to mix the original order of composition with texts published out of that order. On the whole, the annotation of the stories is useful, but rather patchy in places. For example, in "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" (the first story), portière (28) is translated in the end notes, whereas phrases such as On a fait des folies pour moi (36) are not. Similar instances abound throughout the other stories. From the perspective of Wilde scholars, the most dissatisfying aspect of this volume is her limited critical approach. In fairness to Munay, it should be mentioned that the length of her introduction was most likely kept to a minimum by the publisher. It is unfortunate that a restriction of length entailed a restriction of scope as well...