A New Secondary Bibliography of Wilde

ELT 38:2 1995 community (126). These were also the views of George Bernard Shaw who, in rejecting the "sacredness" of human life, insisted that "if we desire a certain type of civüization and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it..." (63). The half-mad HeppenstaU was even more extreme when he wrote that he would "happUy commit total genocide" to rid the world of such "mongrel" peoples as the Arabs and Irish (210). Wyndham Lewis, "the intellectuals' intellectual" so greatly admired by T. S. Eliot, Osbert SitweU, and Rebecca West, is portrayed by Carey as the great miscreant among the modernists. An ardent Nietzschean, a woman hater, and avowed racist and pro-Nazi, Lewis decried "the feminization of the West" and exalted "the 'masculine' inteUectual stance" (182ff). To Lewis, the stupid, slow-witted and slothful , with their "feniinine characteristics, had to be eliminated." Although Carey has been criticized for his spirited attack on the modernists and for using "selective quotations" from their writings to indict them, his work certainly sheds light on an important sector of the late nineteenth and twentieth century literary inteUigentsia. Despite the strictures of his critics, Carey's indictment of the modernists is a very significant contribution to an understanding of the High Culture vs. Popular Culture controversy. J. O. Baylen, Emeritus ______________ Eastbourne, England A New Secondary Bibliography of Wilde Thomas A. Mikolyzk, comp. Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. xiv + 489 pp. $69.50 E. H. MIKHAIL'S Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1978), the first major secondary bibliography on WUde to appear, attempted to fiU a need in WUde studies, but ite profusion of errors, omissions, and sparse or non-existent annotations has limited its usefulness. In annotating Mikhail's work, Thomas Mikolyzk calls it an "excellent, exhaustive bibliography...." Presumably, Mikolyzk, who is not a WUde scholar but a reference librarian at Harper CoUege, admires Mikhail's work because of its seeming thoroughness and accuracy . At first glance, Mikolyzk's work also seems quite thorough (certainly , the annotations are generaUy fuUer and more descriptive than Mikhail's), but when one looks more closely, some of the same deficiencies that plague MikhaU's bibliography also plague Mikolyzk's. In both cases, usefulness is diminished by a lack of attention to details that can 270 book Reviews mislead or thwart the researcher. Such a notable weakness is regrettable since Mikolyzk's impressively ambitious work gathers items far and wide. Amajor deficiency in Mikolyzk's work is the notable lack of cross-referencing : for example, none of 127 items listed separately is cross-referenced to Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, of which Mikolyzk remarks: "Many of the essays are difficult to locate"—presumably, then, the greater the need for cross-referencing so that the reader knows where to see reliable reprints of material "difficult to locate." Another potentially thwarting experience for a non-specialist is Mikolyzk's listing of the dubious pamphlet titled Echoes (a rare copy of which is in the British Library), which contains four "poems in prose" attributed to WUde by GabrieUe Enthoven, the theater historian, who, having heard him recite them, had them privately printed. Mikolyzk does not give the titles of the poems in prose in the annotation, nor does he inform the reader that Vyvyan Holland reprinted these poems in prose in Son of Oscar Wilde (1945). Furthermore, he does not direct the researcher to Aimée Lowther's printing of these works in four separate issues of Gordon Craig's periodical, the Mask (Florence, Italy), in 1912. Mikolyzk merely lists these poems in prose without noting Echoes or HoUand. In addition, a number of major works that are partially or entirely on Wilde are overlooked in the bibliography, a rather startling deficiency in view of the fact that Mikolyzk includes works that even seasoned Wilde scholars might not be aware of. I list some significant omissions: Stanley Weintraub, Whistler: A Biography (1974); The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s, ed. Karl Beckson (1977); Michael Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (1978); Ian Fletcher, ed., Decadence and the 1890s (1979); Kevin...