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Preface
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
• preface • To date, there has been no complete or reliable record of Wilde’s interviews in the United States and Canada in 1882. In Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1936), a trade book with few pretensions to scholarly accuracy, Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith identify forty-four interviews with the author in 1882, but they rarely quote more than two or three sentences from any of them, and they provide only fragmentary information about their sources. E. H. Mikhail includes nineteen interviews conducted in 1882 in his edited collection Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections (1979), all of them originally identified by Lewis and Smith. Mikhail also fails to indicate his omissions from the interviews he reproduces. Virtually none of the interviews in his edition is complete or accurate. Moreover, neither the Lewis-Smith volume nor the Mikhail collection contains any significant annotations. Our book repairs the neglect of Wilde’s interviews and supplies reliable, comprehensive, and annotated transcriptions. (Because these interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than written texts, we have standardized spelling and punctuation and silently corrected other obvious mistakes.) To be sure, not all Wilde’s conversations with reporters merit reprinting, and we have made judicious selections for this volume. It contains the complete texts of forty-eight of the ninety-eight interviews known to have been published during his North American tour. We reprint in an appendix a transcript of the lecture about America that he delivered in England in 1883. We also append a chronological list of all 107 interviews with Wilde known to exist, fifty-eight of them new to scholarship. • • • Thanks to Susan Kayorie and Nicolas Witschi for their assistance in assembling this volume. i-xii_1-196_Wild.indd 11 8/4/09 9:11:28 AM i-xii_1-196_Wild.indd 12 8/4/09 9:11:28 AM ...