Essays on Wilde

In the last chapter of Oscar Wilde, a collection of nine new essays edited by Jarlath Killeen, D. C. Rose's survey of Wilde on the Web demonstrates that we live in an age in which information on Wilde proliferates as never before. From academic conferences and journals to national and international societies, fan clubs, reading and discussion groups, Wilde is certainly extensively talked about in the twenty-first century and his voice (often a hybrid of textual and biographical— sometimes anecdotal—material) retains a remarkable ability to speak across political, social and national borders. Within the world of higher education, the last twenty or so years have seen a sharp increase in Wilde's presence in academic publishing as well as in the classroom. This is quite right. Students find it easy to connect with Wilde: his humour translates well into the twenty-first century and his theories are challenging without being patronising (compare his critical essays to Matthew Arnold's or Ruskin's, for instance). Wilde is their, and our, contemporary: he is perhaps first and foremost a writer who was able to render the difficulty of being in the present and having to juggle multiple identities: novelist, critic, classicist, playwright, journalist, celebrity, outlaw, bourgeois, queer, consumer, socialist, Darwinian, aesthete, Irish, cosmopolitan, global. Faced with this wealth of material and approaches, Wilde studies are thriving. And, fortunately, they show no sign of running out of steam.

Killeen is conscious of this state of overabundance. In fact, he opens his introduction by ironically asking if there will "never be an end to books devoted to Oscar Wilde." Like Killeen, every contemporary Wilde scholar surely must ask how her or his work contributes to this ever-growing field. Killeen's claim for the present volume is that it should represent "a (relatively) balanced view of Wilde studies as it is currently comprised," delivered in a jargon-free prose able to bridge the gap between an academic and a general audience. Unfortunately, the volume does not quite manage to achieve this ambitious latitude, as most of the material here is really addressed to an upper-division undergraduate audience rather than to academics. Wilde scholars should not expect to find much original research or innovative approaches in these pages, but rather well-informed contextualisations of particular works and themes, and evaluations of the state of critical debate.

The best comparison is therefore with a collection such as the Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997), edited by Peter Raby. Killeen's collection is not likely to replace the aging Cambridge Companion, though, because, unlike Raby's, this book is not always sure of its identity: the contributors take different approaches to their topics—more or less interpretative, with or without surveys of existing criticism—and this gives Killeen's book less unity than a traditional companion. Again, as in a companion, the chapters are organised around genre: poetry, criticism, short story, novel, and so on—a sensible decision in terms of readability and ease of consultation. But some important writings are almost entirely left out, notably De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the latter of which is only given a brief mention in Florina Tufescu's fine discussion of Wilde's poetry.

Several essays get the tone just right. Anne Markey's piece on Wilde's short fiction is informative and provides an eloquent and precise historical contextualisation. Markey balances existing critical opinions and presents a sophisticated yet approachable argument on storytelling and interpretation that shows Wilde as a skilful manipulator of genre and voice and brings out the interpretative challenges that these writings pose to students. In another well-pitched essay, this time on criticism, Bruce Bashford explains Wilde's use of dialectics and paradox and traces his debt to Hegel and Pater. Wilde's revisionary take on Paterian aestheticism is also the subject of an essay on heredity and inheritance by Anne Varty. Reading side by side Aestheticism and Darwinian science, Varty explores Wilde's understanding...