Oscar Wilde, Recent Research

A Supplement to "Oscar Wilde Revalued"

Ian Small

Publication Year: 2000

Oscar Wilde: Recent Research updates and reconceptualizes the bibliographic objectives of the earlier Oscar Wilde Revalued. This new volume surveys research on Wilde from 1992 to 2000, but in a much more explicitly evaluative manner. The opening chapter, “Wilde in the 1990s,” traces the main directions of Wilde research over the past decade. Critical material is then reviewed under three broad categories. The first, Biography, is concerned with the continuing fascination with Wilde’s life, and its emphasis on how critics have moved on from dissatisfaction with Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1987). Recent Critical Paradigms evaluates research channelled through master-narratives that have emerged in the 1990s, ways of describing Wilde’s work: the “gay” Wilde, the “Irish” Wilde, and “Wilde and Consumerism.” Wilde the Writer, the third category, centres on an important trend in research during the last decade, what might be thought the less glamorous aspects of the oeuvre—from the seriousness with which Wilde took his role as a poet, to the sheer amount of time he devoted to writing journalism, to the complexities of the production and staging of the plays. Oscar Wilde: Recent Research also contains sections devoted to sources and intertexts, to thematic studies, to essay collections, and to critical monographs which take Wilde as their sole subject. The book includes information about new research resources, and about manuscript discoveries and letters. It concludes with an extensive bibliography organized alphabetically and in terms of Wilde’s works and an index of critics.

Published by: ELT Press

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

Title Page, Copyright Page

pdf icon Download PDF (24.8 KB)

pdf icon Download PDF (16.1 KB)

Preface

pdf icon Download PDF (26.2 KB)
p. ix-ix

IN THIS VOLUME I have tried to offer an account of recent research on Oscar Wilde since 1993 which is both complete and useful for the academic reader. In the nature of things, however, it is not comprehensive. In particular many reprints or cheap editions of individual works have been silently passed over. Some critical articles have also ...

Introduction

pdf icon Download PDF (35.5 KB)
pp. 1-4

The study for which this volume is a supplement, Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research, was published in mid-1993. Because of the varying speed at which academic publications cross the Atlantic, however, the book’s effective cut-off date for material was the end of 1992. In Oscar Wilde ...

1. Wilde in the 1990s

pdf icon Download PDF (51.6 KB)
pp. 5-13

In Oscar Wilde Revalued I offered a number of predictions about the possible future directions of research and scholarship in Wilde studies. One of the interests, but also one of the disappointments, of compiling and writing the present supplement has been to discover whether these predictions have materialized and whether the trends ...

2. Biography

pdf icon Download PDF (92.2 KB)
pp. 15-36

The best recent testimony to the continuing strength of interest in Wilde’s life has been the reissuing in 1997 of two early biographies by Vyvyan Holland and Sheridan Morley, both of which are of a pre-Ellmann vintage. The timing of their re-publication can perhaps be explained by the interest generated by Brian Gilbert’s film Wilde. ...

3. New Paradigms in Cultural & Literary History

pdf icon Download PDF (153.5 KB)
pp. 37-78

I observed in Oscar Wilde Revalued that the reassessment of Wilde’s reputation in the 1970s and 1980s owed a great deal to the insights generated by the explicit critical theorizing of those decades. This use of theory has continued but with some significant qualifications. Broadly speaking, where theorizing had its most dramatic impact ...

4. Wilde the Writer

pdf icon Download PDF (224.3 KB)
pp. 79-142

A notable feature of some research on Wilde in the 1990s was an attention to the way he wrote as much as to what he wrote. This development might have a straightforward pragmatic explanation, insofar as information about Wilde’s drafts and typescripts is now much more easily available than it was prior to 1980. It might...

5. Critical & Introductory Studies

pdf icon Download PDF (62.4 KB)
pp. 143-154

The amount of attention given in critical essays to Wilde’s nationality and sexuality might lead one to think that they were the only new ways of conceptualizing his life and work in the 1990s. Although it is true that the past decade has not seen a large number of book-length studies of Wilde, those which have appeared have been ...

6. Editions

pdf icon Download PDF (61.4 KB)
pp. 155-166

In Oscar Wilde Revalued I noted that there was still not a satisfactory complete edition of Wilde and although a full edition had been commissioned it was “at least three years in the future” (201). That edition was the Oxford English Texts edition of the Complete Works. Three years proved to be an optimistic prediction. Nevertheless the...

7. Research Resources

pdf icon Download PDF (58.1 KB)
pp. 167-177

With two significant exceptions, during the past eight years very little manuscript material has come to light. The first exception is the new correspondence (collected and edited by Merlin Holland; see 7. ii.). The second is the reappearance of a scrap-book (held in a private collection) which Wilde put together as an undergraduate ...

8. Bibliography

pdf icon Download PDF (128.3 KB)
pp. 179- 221

Index of Critics

pdf icon Download PDF (7.1 MB)
pp. [1]-[4]

E-ISBN-13: 9780944318379
Print-ISBN-13: 9780944318140
Print-ISBN-10: 0944318142

Page Count: 232
Illustrations: 1 drawing
Publication Year: 2000

Series Title: 1880-1920 British Authors Series, No. 15