Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (review)

{ 220 } BOOK REV IEWS the concept of character. Similar to the work of some modernist playwrights, her pieces resembled dreamlike meditations, episodic and collage-like with stage pictures dissolving one into the other. Garelick also examines Fuller’s influence on alternative views of character. Some modernist playwrights were intrigued with character as mutable and fluid. Fuller spent her career transfiguring multiple times during a performance, never mooring herself to one effigy or vision for too long. The book concludes with a few examples of contemporary artists whose work references Fuller’s and a bibliography organized by type of publication, providing readers with a rich and diverse array of resources to investigate. Garelick ’s deep analysis of Fuller’s performance techniques reveals an alchemical artist whose performance aesthetic reduced the theatrical forms of her day to a state of prima materia. In the liminal space of her performative crucible, Fuller transfigured the ingredients of narrative, character, scenography, and language through technology, abstraction, and augmentation. Garelick’s text is a compelling argument for the centralization of Loie Fuller’s work in relation to understanding of modernist performance history. —PATRICIA K. DOWNEY University of South Dakota \ Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde. By Paul Fortunato. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge, 2007. 162 pp. $110.00 cloth. Since belatedly acknowledging Oscar Wilde’s worth as a theorist and literary figure more than half a century after his death, critics have attempted—often in vain and sometimes in error—to place the poet and dramatist in the historical spectrum of modernist aesthetics and theory. In Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde, Paul Fortunato suggests three possible stages to Wilde scholarship, the first being the sixty years after Wilde’s death, when he was “critically ignored in Anglo-American scholarship” (16). The second stage seems to have started in the 1980s and not only restored Wilde to literary significance but also established him as a prominent literary modernist . Fortunato points out that critics of this stage (e.g., Richard Ellman and Linda Dowling, leading rehabilitators of Wilde scholarship) have reconciled themselves to Wilde’s consumer associations and journalistic involvements by { 221 } BOOK REV IEWS considering them a means of supplemental income (17). In doing so, Fortunato argues, they discredit an essential component of Wilde’s aesthetic and the very type of modernist Wilde was, that is, a consumer modernist. Fortunato proposes a third stage—represented by recent scholars who have returned to Wilde’s mass-culture involvement in order to clarify his literary and aesthetic career—and presents himself as part of this third stage. In this study, Fortunato meticulously and creatively unravels his assertion that Wilde’s activity in the mass cultural realm was more than just a subset of “real” work; in fact, Wilde could neither create nor conceive of art that was not commodified. Drawing from the work of other third-stage critics such as Josephine Guy, Ian Small, and Edward Said, Fortunato illustrates how Wilde, beginning his literary career amid the burgeoning mega-institutions of press, fashion, and advertising, played the times, albeit in his customary style of bewildering paradox. Fortunato consistently outlines his argument in an organized, succinct style. After beginning with a colorful description of the society and culture in which Wilde operated, Fortunato engages in cultural study analyses of the lateVictorian mega-industries of journalism, fashion, and theatre. In the course of this analysis, Fortunato carefully traces the development of Wilde’s aesthetic theories—particularly the aesthetics of surface, image, and ritual—amid his work as a “journalist, magazine editor, commentator on dress and design, and popular playwright” (ix). In chapter 1, Fortunato summarizes Wilde’s artistic and personal relationships with key literary, artistic, and social persons of the time so as to better answer the question of how a “bohemian anarchist [found] himself writing West End comedies about elitist society” (1). With a liberal smattering of the Wildean anecdotes that are essential to a study of the quizzical poet and dramatist , Fortunato effectively re-creates the backdrop against which Wilde’s literary career spanned—a career the author spends the next two chapters summarizing , lending...