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  • The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vols. VI and VII, Journalism Parts I and II ed. by John Stokes, and Mark W. Turner
  • John Peters
Stokes, John and Mark W. Turner, eds. 2013. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vols. VI and VII, Journalism Parts I and II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 978-0-19811964-7, 978-0-19811963-0, Pp. lxiii+ 430, xi+ 622. $237.50 ea.

As the titles suggest, these latest volumes from the Oxford English Texts series of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde cover Wilde’s journalism. [End Page 169] These volumes are an excellent collection of Wilde’s journalism that not only chronicle his journalistic career but also tell us much of British journalism in general in the late nineteenth century. While noting the somewhat fluid boundary between Wilde’s criticism and his journalism, the editors of these volumes reiterate the distinction this series made earlier with the 2007 edition of Wilde’s criticism (edited by Josephine M. Guy), arguing that his extended critical essays (“The Decay of Lying”, “The Truth of Masks”, “The Critic as Artist”, “Pen, Pencil, and Poison”, “Historical Criticism”, and “The Soul of Man”) serve a different purpose from his journalism. This is a reasonable argument, but it is helpful that the editors of these volumes acknowledge the degree to which Wilde’s journalism strays into the realm of literary criticism.

The prefatory material is extensive and helpful. The editors do a good job of chronicling Wilde’s contributions to the journalism of his day and how he in part shaped the direction of some of those venues with which he was associated, such as Women’s World. Furthermore, this material is one of the better overviews of Wilde’s relationship to the rise of the new journalism, which challenged the conventional and conservative journalism in Britain during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The editors explain the effect of the new journalism, Wilde’s role in it, and its relationship to his own critical and creative writing that would follow. Similarly, the explanatory notes offer background information on issues both large and small that arise surrounding these writings, not only identifying people and places but also providing reasons for including certain reviews in the Dubia section. In all, they are far more extensive than anything that had appeared previously. Along with the prefatory material and explanatory notes, the editors have included two appendices. One is the manuscript for an incomplete review, and the other is an article from the New York Daily Tribune, which was based upon an earlier lecture Wilde had delivered in England. Both were useful, the first in demonstrating Wilde’s composition process when reviewing, and the second in showing his revision process when he developed earlier ideas for later publications.

The editors have been equally good with textual and editing issues. As with all the other volumes of this edition, they have done a thorough and sensible job in editing Wilde’s journalism. Such editing work, of course, does not present the same kinds of challenges that confronted Ian Small, for example, in editing the De Profundus writings. The almost complete lack of extant manuscripts, typescripts, and/or multiple versions of these short essays and reviews frees the reviewers from some of the trickier textual editing that so many of the other volumes in this series required. Nevertheless, the editors do a good job of explaining the difficult tasks they [End Page 170] confronted that were unique to these writings. Not the least of these difficulties was determining which unsigned works were Wilde’s. As the editors note, although Robert Ross included a number of unsigned pieces in his 1908 edition of Wilde’s writings, there is often little evidence to suggest how he determined that these writings were Wilde’s. A similar problem exists with Stuart Mason’s 1914 Bibliography. Consequently, the editors rightly felt that they could not rely solely on Ross’s or Mason’s assertion that a particular writing should be attributed to Wilde without other corroborating evidence. The editors judiciously determined which writings to attribute to Wilde, which to reject entirely, and which to relegate to...

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