Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle by Deaglán Ó Donghaile (review)

Matthew Sturgis's biography of Oscar Wilde, Oscar: A Life (2018), begins with a recent catalogue of Wilde's commercial manifestations, including T-shirts and mobile phone cases. In the intervening time between Sturgis's volume and the one previously regarded as the gold standard of Wilde biography, Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde (1987), the world of Wilde merchandise has only further blossomed in the proliferating markets of late capitalism. Deaglán Ó Donghaile, with his monograph Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle, asks us to remember that Wilde was not simply a quippy provocateur. He was also a radical, something one could easily miss for the way that his memorable epigrams have been made into tchotchkes that can be delivered with overnight shipping.

Through the course of seven chapters, Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics reads Wilde as a radical tout court. For Ó Donghaile, Wilde's work "engage[s] with politics in relation to the crises generated by late Victorian imperialism and capitalism," and does so "at the forefront of his literary, cultural and political thought" (5). Politics has long been a contested issue in Wilde scholarship. On a familiar view, Wilde paid lip service to more radical causes but was ultimately more invested in his project of aestheticism, standardly taken to mean "beauty for beauty's sake." However, particularly in the uptick of Wilde scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century, many have noted Wilde's radical political views. To pick just one recent example, Nicholas Frankel's Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde (2018) frames Wilde as a contributor to the literature on prison abolition. Ó Donghaile, however, advances a case for Wilde's entire body of work as an expression of radical political thinking. Considering Wilde's liminal place in English history, exiting the Victorian era and pointing at the modernism to come, this argument represents a useful intervention into Wilde's place in the intellectual history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland and England. The accessible prose and scrupulous research in this volume serve as a well from which those interested in Wilde's political beliefs can draw.

This study takes a text-per-chapter approach to illustrate the arc of Wilde's radical thinking, though some contain a set of texts. Because of the generic variety and long temporal arc of these textual selections, spanning Wilde's American speaking tour in the early 1880s to his final years at the dawn of the twentieth century, Ó Donghaile faces a challenge in how it blankets Wilde's bibliography with one word, "radical." Could Wilde's early 1880s lectures in America, not long removed from his years at Oxford, really be radical in the same way that his prison writings are, after his writing took a more moralistic and even religious turn?

The first chapter outlines the republican views Wilde advanced regarding his native Ireland on his American speaking tour. Ó Donghaile links these beliefs to the influence of Wilde's mother, Lady Jane "Speranza" Wilde, a noted republican author, and persuasively shows that by making the case for Irish nationalism, Wilde distanced himself from the anti-Irish views of one of his influential Oxford tutors, John Ruskin. Yet when Ó Donghaile claims that Wilde told his American audiences of "culture's potential to mobilise and advance the radical cause of Irish independence," one wonders why Wilde's output in his literary halcyon years slightly less than a decade later, from 1890–95, do not centralize Irish concerns and set themselves in a distinctly English milieu (51). There is a reason why several critical projects, including those by Declan Kiberd (1997) and Richard Pine (1995), have done extensive work to recuperate Wilde's Irishness. To be fair, Ó Donghaile faces the unenviable task shared by all Wilde scholars: because the man was so paradoxical, any single taxonomy will prove insufficient...