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  • Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend
  • Lowry Julien Martin (bio)
Joseph Bristow, ed., Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xlii+355 pp. $28.95 (paper).

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend is an eclectic selection of essays that reveals not only the unsuspected ways that Wilde has participated in modern culture, but also how modern culture has worked to create his legend. Many of the essays address how Wilde's life and work fueled the aesthetic visions of cultural arbitrators from photographers to radical writers to experimental artists. Drawing on the alleged "facts" of his life, the artistic works of these creative minds contributed to the legend of Wilde as a sexual martyr, anarchist, or sexual visionary, and more than a century after his death he remains central to cultural and academic conversations—inspiring scholarly debate and artistic production across nations and societies. His literary and cultural longevity can be attributed to the range of ways that his work and life resonate with twentieth-century anxieties and social movements. The emergence of the "Modern Woman," growing feminist movements, and formation of sexually dissonant communities all found encouragement and motivation in Wilde's life and work. Many of the articles demonstrate why Wilde's protean legacy has contributed to materialist, post-modern, and queer criticisms. Thus, for both scholars and a general audience this book is an insightful look at the ways that celebrity, biography and art converge to shape contemporary culture.

The first three chapters make connections between Wilde's performativity—as a witty raconteur, photographic subject, and political subversive—and certain modern developments of the fin-de-siècle. These essays lead the reader from the new centers of power in Victorian England (the dinner parties of the rich and politically connected) to the United States Supreme Court which had to consider whether the photographer or subject had proprietary rights to the "posed images." Wilde not only was part of the cutting-edge of what became celebrity culture in the twentieth century, but these articles make clear that Wilde's different public constructs were a double-edged sword that increased his popularity while also leaving him vulnerable to social and legal attack. For instance, Lucy McDermid argues that Wilde's trenchant wit made him powerful enemies among the well-heeled dinner party set whose inveterate connections negatively influenced his trials in London in 1895. Likewise the famous poses of Wilde the dandy, taken during his American tour, were later read as revealing his "feminine," and thus "homosexual," nature. A couple of essays discuss the unreliability of historical information such as photographs or trial transcripts to provide the "truth" of Wilde's life while carefully demonstrating how these "facts" have been deployed to fuel more fictions and speculation about Wilde. What emerges from these analyses is that part of Wilde's lingering impact on [End Page 110] modern culture is his plasticity, and his multi-dimensionality allows for appropriation by many groups throughout time, from the anarchists of Belle Epoque France and sexual libertarians of Imperial and Weimar Germany to AIDS activists and filmmakers of the late twentieth century.

The beauty of this edited collection is that all of these essays uncover the unsuspected or less conspicuous dimensions of Wilde's mark on modern culture such as his impact on choreography or ideas about sexual equality. One such example is Julie Townsend's "Staking Salomé: The Literary Forefathers and Choreographic Daughters of Oscar Wilde's 'Hysterical and Perverted Creature.'" Although Wilde's celebrated play Salomé was part of a French literary genealogy that can be traced back to Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô or Stéphane Mallarmé's "Héroidade," his disconnected and figurative dialogue lent themselves to the unconventional elements of "modern dance." His unorthodox telling of Salomé's story contributed to new ways of thinking about choreography as was evidenced by the dancer Loïe Fuller's interpretation of Salomé. Her performance emblematized the erotic energy of Wilde's work while introducing such new technology as electric lighting and prosthetics into modern dance. Another essay elucidates how shifts in conceptions...

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