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Wilde in the Dream Factory studies the influence of Oscar Wilde's work on American cinema and culture, with close readings of Wilde's works alongside screwball comedies and film noir of the 1930s and 40s.
List of contents
- List of Figures
- Preface: The Ghosts of Wildean Decadence
- 1: Wilde in the American Imagination
- 2: Naughty, Decadent, Silent Moving Pictures
- 3: Salome on Sunset Boulevard
- 4: Wilde-ish Spirit Goes West
- 5: The Gangster as Aesthete
- 6: A Wildean Universe: From Epigrams to Screwball Talk
- 7: The Aesthete as Monster
- Oscar Wilde, Hollywood Rebel: Conclusion
- Select Works Cited
- Selected Filmography
- Index
- Acknowledgements
About the author
She is author of Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (2013), and co-editor of Decadence in the Age of Modernism (2019).
Summary
Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. This is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema become the movies, it reveals how Wilde helped to shape Hollywood in the early twentieth century.
It begins with his 1882 American tour, and traces the ongoing popularity of his plays and novel in the early twentieth century, after his ignominious death. Following the early filmmakers, writers and actors as they headed West in the Hollywood boom, it uncovers how and why they took Wilde's spirit with them. There, in Hollywood, in the early days of silent cinema, Wilde's works were adapted. They were also beginning to define a new kind of style -- a 'Wilde-ish spirit', as Ernst Lubitsch called it -- filtering into the imaginations of Lubitsch himself, as well as Alla Nazimova, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein and many others. These were the people who translated Wilde's queer playfulness into the creation of screwball comedies, gangster movies, B-movie horrors, and films noir. There, Wilde and his style embodied a spirit of rebellion and naughtiness, providing a blue-print for the charismatic cinematic criminal and screwball talk onscreen.
Discussing films including Bringing Up Baby, Underworld, and Laura, alongside definitive adaptations of Wilde's works, including, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, and Salome, Wilde in the Dream Factory revises how we understand both Wilde's afterlife and cinema's beginnings.
Additional text
[Hext's] range of reference is impressive...[a] staggeringly broad sweep...[a] stimulating and readable study...
