The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (review)

Oscar Wilde's work has long been subject to unusual appropriations. Certainly one of the stranger chapters in Wilde's afterlife was in Nazi Germany: Third Reich officials looked kindly on his society plays, with the result that he became the most performed author of the Berlin theater season between 1936 and 1937. In a 1935 German translation of An Ideal Husband (1895), actors are directed to speak "'strongly', 'with fanatical resolve' or 'with a steely tension of will'" (qtd. in Evangelista 196). This is one of many fascinating local deployments of Wilde discussed in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, part of Continuum's expansive twenty-one-volume The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series. Like its companions, this book is a hybrid reference work and essay collection: it compiles a bibliography of European responses to Wilde and presents new critical work on his reception. In addition to eighteen essays representing twelve countries, the volume includes substantial timelines of translations and performances of Wilde's essays, poetry, fiction, and plays. It makes a strong contribution to ongoing work regarding the international dimensions of aestheticism and decadence.

The twentieth-century European Wilde who emerges here is quite different from the posthumous British Wilde; the latter, as Joseph Bristow notes in his essay, faded from view first because he was shameful to Victorians and then because he was unfashionable to modernists. By contrast, Wilde's personality and work began to attract the attention of many European literary figures only after his death, partly due to the success of Richard Strauss's 1905 opera version of Salomé (1891), which occupies a prominent role in these essays. Wilde's reach extended well beyond France, where the story of his reception is most familiar. Due to the extensive translation of his works in Moderní Revue, Zdene.k Beran writes, Wilde became a central figure for a coterie of Czech decadents. In both Hungary and Croatia, Salomé was regularly an important part of the theater season. Surveying Wilde's European dissemination, Stefano Evangelista's introduction offers a rich sense of the various images of Wilde, for instance: as a representative of Englishness whose works were used as language primers, a British Friedrich Nietzsche, or a psychological case study in sexual perversion.

Wilde's influence was of course rarely direct or transparent; in addition to chronicling Wilde's reception, these essays adeptly trace its complications. Wilde presents a particularly compelling case with which to think about questions of reception for several reasons. His open homosexuality and the fame of his trials meant that Wilde's name was a signifier for deviance in ways that exceeded the literary domain (the Italian term oscarwildismo, Elisa Bizzotto points out, is a sexual, not a literary epithet). Wilde's oeuvre has also always been understood to include his life as well as his writing, and these essays are as much about reactions to a polarizing celebrity as they are about the international fortunes of a discrete body of literary work. Furthermore, Wilde's witty skirmishes with British moralism made certain aspects of his work untranslatable—The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) becomes, flatly, Bunbury in most of Europe—while simultaneously placing questions about national identity at the forefront of his writing.

On balance, the essays navigate these issues admirably. Wilde's complicated status as representative of British sensibilities is a recurring focus. Richard A. Cardwell writes that Spain, which in the early 1900s was articulating its desire for a homegrown modernism in the racially inflected language of Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau, was not generally welcoming to a writer whose work "seemed to have no positive role to play in the process of national regeneration" (153). In a pair of essays on Wilde's aspirational Frenchness, Emily Eells and Richard Hibbitt discuss Wilde's mixed reception there. Although many prominent French writers took Wilde up as a cause celèbre who exposed British moral hypocrisy at its worst...