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Book Reviews Wilde & Ambiguity Michael Patrick Gillespie. Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. xi + 204 pp. $45.00 IN OSCAR WILDE and the Poetics of Ambiguity, Michael Gillespie presents the first critical approach to Wilde's entire canon based on reader-response theory. This stimulating study continues and expands the author's previous work on Wilde, which includes the Twayne Masterwork volume, The Picture of Dorian Gray: "What the World Thinks of Me", and several articles, two of which are republished here in revised form (one from ELT 35:1 1992). As the title suggests, Gillespie regards ambiguity as fundamental to Wilde's writing; indeed, "multiplicity" is "the defining feature of Wilde's artistic consciousness," and, he argues, only by embracing this multiplicity can the reader make the expansive imaginative responses that the works invite. Critical approaches which foreground particular elements of the text while suppressing alternative or even contradictory meanings, cannot, in Gillespie's view, do justice to Wilde's aesthetics. (And in the course of this study, several Wildean scholars are taken firmly to task for forwarding polemical agendas which disregard the inherent polyvocality of the text.) Gillespie, by contrast, adopts an admirably inclusive approach that admits the validity of a range of responses to Wilde's works but privileges none. "In this fashion," he writes, "one does not compete in attempts to assert the best interpretation of Wilde's canon; rather, one endeavors, by attending to the diversity that it accommodates, to draw the greatest amount of pleasure from his work." The evolution of Wilde's writings towards multiplicity is traced chronologically through its diverse intra- and extratextual elements. In particular—and this is one of the most rewarding features of this study—Gillespie seeks to contextualize Wilde's oeuvre by exploring the literary, intellectual and cultural forces that shaped his aesthetics. Particular attention is paid to Wilde's relationship with his audience, revealing how his interaction with society, and his desire for public acclaim, shaped the imaginative structure of his works and his process of composition. For, in Gillespie's convincing assessment, Wilde, far from 185 ELT 41 : 2 1998 being an iconoclast, remained highly attentive to public opinion and taste. Wilde's early writings, such as the "truly mediocre" verse, are too "linear" and "monologic" to detain Gillespie long, and while traces of the emerging both/and pluralistic style are detected in the shorter fiction and fairy tales, Gillespie only really begins to warm to his theme with subtle readings of the belletristic essays of the late 1880s ("The Decay of Lying," "A Pen, Pencil and Poison," "The Critic as Artist," and "The Portrait of Mr WH."). The interpretive questions posed in these essays —questions of the reader's imaginative engagement with the text and of authorial presence (anticipating, Gillespie suggests, Barthes and Foucault)—are skillfully drawn together into "a nascent theory of interpretive response," in which Wilde can be seen "to reject narrow ideological dispositions in his art and embrace a pluralistic response to reality." Gillespie goes on to apply these interpretive strategies to the narrative multiplicity of The Picture of Dorian Gray. While he claims that the ambiguities and ambivalences of the novel's complex pluralistic discourse invite the reader "to entertain simultaneously a range of diverse but equally satisfying responses," the intratextual examples he offers struggle at times to substantiate "protean indeterminacy." The finely detailed analysis confirms Wilde's ability to create characterizations that sustain multiple perspectives (which, for Gillespie, is the hallmark of Wilde's artistic maturity), but rich and complex characters are among the usual features of great fiction and it is hard to see why Wilde's technique of character-portrayal should demand a unique degree of interpretive flexibility from the reader. More persuasive is Gillespie's exploration of the extra textual elements that fostered interpretive freedom in contemporary responses to the novel (the diverse ambience of fin-de-siècle English society, and the pluralism of Wilde's public persona —simultaneously charming and outrageous, and of indeterminate sexual orientation), as is his judicious examination of the textual revisions that reveal Wilde's pragmatic concern for public attitudes. The following chapter on...

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