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The options of Irishness at the end of the twentieth century reflect a great dislocation. (R.F. Foster)1 The last years of the twentieth century saw a remaking of the ways in which Ireland defined itself as a newly wealthy Europeanised liberal society and, for writers, this led to an expansion of the acceptable areas for mainstream creativity and new imaginative territories reflecting this social and cultural change. Fintan O’Toole writes: ‘In the last decade of the century, the Republic embraced another form of globalisation so thoroughly that it came to represent an extreme manifestation of the phenomenon.’2 In Irish writings, marginal discourses, homosexuality for one, now became much more public and central as the law changed and, as the critic Linden Peach suggests,3 ‘previously marginalized groups, albeit not entirely free of their marginalized social, physical and cultural status, bring about a revisioning of the nation’s map in terms of margins and centres’.4 This revisioning of the nation’s map meant that key figures of difficulty like Wilde were now re-appropriated as new symbols of unreflective modernity and post-imperialism within Irish writing. The critic Gerry Smyth queries this unquestioned revisioning for contemporary Irish fictive voices and he does so in the light of a colonised past. He asks: ‘How can the colonized subject articulate differences without metamorphosing into the image of that which she/he opposed?’5 Smyth argues that, ‘As critical strategies, the liberal and radical modes guarantee that the subaltern cannot speak, for speaking in those modes always entails an acknowledgement, however remote or tacit, of the agenda preset by the colonizing power’.6 Wilde, once implicated with anti-colonial strategies and then sidelined in the new Ireland, was now seen as a token of postmodernity . Noreen Doody writes that: . . . Wilde, who once lamented that not being talked about was a far worse thing than being talked about would have no reason to complain on this account in relation to his current reception in Ireland: he is regularly quoted, his plays are continually in performance on the amateur and professional stage and he is endlessly discussed in the print and digital media.7 6. Imagining Wilde the Irishman: 1980–2000 89 90 Oscar’s Shadow However, this new visibility has its many nuances, depending on the use to which Wilde’s name is being deployed. In these last two chapters, I want to query this idea of a contemporary awareness of Wilde and suggest instead that, in the creative sphere, the familiar misconceptions around his homosexuality lurk underneath the surface of this new version of Wilde, our contemporary, the man of wit and subversion for the twentyfirst century speaking to our own remade selves. As seen in the last chapter, Irish institutions that had silenced Wilde’s name, like Trinity College or Portora Royal College, in the 1990s used him as an emblem of liberalisation and inclusiveness, and his name now stood as a kind of shorthand for tolerance and acceptance. This is not unique to Irish culture. As Glyn Davis writes, in relation to contemporary British queer cinema: Over the last decade, a variety of writers (many of whom could be categorised as queer theorists) have argued, retroactively, for Oscar Wilde’s radicalism. Indeed many of them have claimed that Wilde should be interpreted as proto-queer . . . His radical status must surely be undermined or partially offset, for instance, by his class associations and by the canonisation of his work as literature.8 Wilde was refashioned in the light of contemporary cultural needs, despite any real sense of Wilde’s own class associations or his sense of himself as an outcast. This is also true for Wilde’s supposed Irish Republicanism, where his intentions and credentials were irrelevant to his subsequent cultural position, so that Wilde the Irish gay rebel was now being constructed in light of contemporary imaginative pressures and needs. Declan Kiberd suggest that ‘the Irish know, better than most peoples, that the attempt by a post-colony to modernise is a painful and uneven process’.9 In this chapter, I consider the fictive and dramatic representations of Wilde’s life and his work and the uneven ways in which he is employed as an icon of modernity and inclusiveness in the dramas of Terry Eagleton and Thomas Kilroy and in the screenplay of Barry Devlin. To gain a context on the changing perceptions of Wildean sexual difference , it is worth considering ‘Dramas’, a short story published...

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