Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland

Preface

Preface Oscar Wilde was the most famous gay Irishman but, as yet, no fulllength book has dealt with Wilde and his homosexuality within the context of Ireland and of Irish cultural perceptions of his sexuality. This book investigates the questions: What was ‘Oscar’s shadow’, his influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish culture and literature? What has Oscar Wilde meant to Ireland from his disgrace in May 1895 up to the present? The book begins up with what Alan Sinfield in his book The Wilde Century calls ‘unfinished business’ in Irish cultural studies – the business of a cultural history of Wilde’s name, his writings and his homosexuality in modern Irish culture. The book traces Oscar’s shadow in Ireland, from 1895 to the present, using contemporary Irish newspaper reports of the Wilde trials of 1895, previously unpublished archival material and a significant body of Irish critical studies, biographies and dramatisations of Wilde’s life and sexuality. If perceptions of sexual identity evolve partly through public events, how then did the Irish media and literary sources configure Wilde’s homosexuality during the Wilde trials and after? Wilde’s homosexuality was a contested discourse within twentieth-century Ireland, a discourse that became interconnected with Irish cultural nationalism. Thus Wilde became a weathervane for the rare but contentious discussions of homosexuality in Ireland, and his life and his writings usefully intertwine within these debates. This study will set the historical context for cultural and legal perceptions of homosexuality in Ireland. This study of the formation of homosexuality in Ireland into the twentieth century, the first such study, centres on an account of Wilde’s visible presence as sexual ‘other’, analysing the strategies of normalisation used to police his unnameable sin within Irish media and literary accounts. The book argues that Wilde in Irish culture was perceived not so much as Oscar Wilde the unspeakable but much more as Oscar Wilde the dissident Irishman. Wilde, famous for his writings and notorious for his sexuality, is central for perceptions of homosexuality in modern Ireland. Éibhear Walshe, School of English. University College Cork, Ireland, 2011 xiii ...