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This collection of new essays devoted to Oscar Wilde's classic novel presents new critical work by prominent scholars that deal with many aspects of the famed novel. Essays range from literary influences on the novel and its controversial early reception to its afterlife in literature, film, dance, photography, theatre, and television. It is also one of the most famous gay or queer literary texts of all time. Wilde's novel has been translated into numerous languages and is a work with a global following. Beautifully illustrated, this collection, edited by Richard Kaye, offers multiple perspectives on Wilde's novel in fourteen highly readable essays.
List of contents
- Introduction: The Haunting of Dorian Gray
- The Precedents, Sources, and Literary Contexts of Dorian Gray
- 1: The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Aesthetic Tradition: Faithful Allusion, Perilous Misquotation
- 2: The Picture That Failed, or the Light of Dorian Gray
- 3: "What Never Dies": The Picture of Dorian Gray and Its Afterlife in French Literature and Art
- The Visual Imagination of The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 4: Picturing Dorian: Temporality, Abstraction, and Modernity in The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 5: Illustrating Dorian Gray: The Contingent Ephemerality of Beauty
- Dorian Gray's Philosophical, Cultural, and Erotic Entanglements
- 6: The Vitality of Dorian Gray: Darwinism, Philosophy, Life
- 7: "A Form of Reverie, a Malady of Dreaming": Dorian Gray, Personality, and Mass Culture
- 8: Dorian Gray's Generic Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Queer Form
- The Formal Vicissitudes of a Decadent Novel
- 9: Exquisite Fantasy: Language and Anti-Mimesis in The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 10: Fin-de-Siècle Feelings: Melodrama and the Aesthetics and Ethics of Emotion in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 11: The Most Decadent Chapter: Ornamentation, Influence, and the Challenge to Realism in The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Dorian Gray's Afterlife in Fiction, Film, Theater, Dance, and Performance
- 12: The Vienna "Dorian Gray Epidemic" of 1907: Theatrical Distortion, Critical Dissent, and the First Stagings of Wilde's Novel
- 13: Red Herrings and Yellow Birds: The 1945 Hollywood Film The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 14: Dorian Gray Forever: Decadence, Glamor, and the Vicissitudes of Pop Culture Adaptation
About the author
Richard A. Kaye
is Professor of English at Hunter College and in the Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the editor of
The D. H. Lawrence Review, the fifty-year old scholarly journal devoted to the British writer.
