Introduction

Introduction A cartoon by Ed Fisher in a recent number of the Chronicle ofHigher Education depicts a 90cktail party in full swing. To one side stands a belligerent gentleman , arms folded and jaw set, to the other the gentleman's long-suffering wife, advising guests not to "bring up the coming fin-de-siecle" as "it will only get him talking about Oscar Wilde." The image - clipped and sent to me by a contributor to the present volume - is a useful reminder of the manner in which Oscar Wilde, at our century's close, has reentered the popular imagination , as artist, commodity, and cautionary figure. Indeed, shortly after the appearance of the Chronicle cartoon, the New Yorker underscored the point in a lead article that attempted to make sense of the Woody Allen debacle by applying to it what it called "the lessons of Oscar Wilde." In academic circles, such notoriety may be measured by the current outpouring of books and essays that have sought to market Wilde and his work in a variety of guises. The past decade alone has given us Richard Ellmann's long-awaited biography - as well as challenges to its "teleological" narrative - Rupert HartDavis 's second volume of letters, Kerry Powell's survey of dramatic and theatrical sources, and the first scholarly editions of Wilde's plays, produced for the New Mermaid series by Russell Jackson and Ian Small. It has also seen pioneering work by a number of critics attempting to plot Wilde's position in the new fields of gay and gender studies, Camille Paglia's incisive, if in-yourface , rejoinders, and Regenia Gagnier's exemplary study of Wilde's place in an emerging consumer culture. (Still to come are Karl Beckson's Wilde Encyclopedia , Peter Raby's Wilde Companion, and the multi-volumed Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, being prepared under the general editorship of Jackson and Small.) On stage, the 1980s and early 1990S have witnessed Wilde's restoration to provincial and West End theatres in a series of high-profile productions by Steven Berkoff, Peter Hall, Nicholas Hytner, and Philip Prowse that have made Wilde, almost a hundred Modem Drama, 37 (1994) 1 2 Introduction years after his death, one of Britain's top grossing playwrights. In the spring of 1993 much of this work was brought together in two international Wilde conferences. Hosted respectively by the University of Birmingham and the Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco), both events provided opportunities for literary critics, social historians, and theatre scholars to debate Wilde's significancefor our time as well as his. The fifteen essays that make up this special issue of Modern Drama - and which I shall let speak for themselves - represent attempts by a number of Wilde's most recent critics to "resee" their subject in the light of such activity. Some employ new approaches from cognate disciplines, others look at the problems raised by Wilde in performance, while still others draw upon hitherto unexamined (or· underexamined) archival material . It is hoped that the "cross talk" between them, as well as the essays themselves , will help to continue the lively debate that has swirled about Wilde even before he boasted, with some prescience, of his special ability to stand "in symbolic relation" to art, culture, literature, and life. JOEL H. KAPLAN ...