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This
Handbook puts Wilde the Icon into an expansive literary, cultural, and dramatic context. Its thirty-six contributors offer a readable guide to Wilde studies for the early twenty-first century. Its comprehensive discussions of his writings show how these interact with, and transfigure, both their age and his life.
List of contents
- Introduction: Wilde Variety
- The Life
- 1: Jarlath Killeen: Ireland
- 2: Alex Murray: Oxford
- 3: Kate Hext: America
- 4: Nick Freeman: London
- 5: Joseph Bristow: The Trials
- 6: Peter Stoneley: Prison
- 7: Elisa Bizzotto: Exile in France and Italy
- The Works
- 8: Kostas Boyiopoulos: Early Poems
- 9: Deaglán Ó Donghaile: Vera and 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism'
- 10: Mark Turner: The Journalism
- 11: Dustin Friedman: The Portrait of Mr W.H. and the short fiction
- 12: Caroline Sumpter: Fairy Tales
- 13: Josephine M. Guy: Intentions
- 14: Giles Whiteley: The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 15: Matthew Potolsky: The Picture of Dorian Gray in Context--Aestheticism, Imperialism, and Capitalism
- 16: Petra Dierkes: Salome
- 17: Sos Eltis: Lady Windermere's Fan
- 18: Anne Varty: A Woman of No Importance
- 19: Greg Mackie: An Ideal Husband
- 20: Francesca Coppa: The Importance of Being Earnest
- 21: Matthew Bradley: De Profundis
- 22: John Stokes: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- Intellectual Contexts
- 23: Shushma Malik: Classical Rome
- 24: Alastair Blanshard: Classical Greece
- 25: Richard Hibbitt: Wilde and France
- 26: Margaret D. Stetz: Wilde and Women
- 27: Lindsay Wilhelm: Evolution
- 28: Simon Joyce: Wilde and Sexuality
- 29: Dominic Janes: Wilde and Fashion
- 30: Dennis Denisoff: Wilde and the Natural World
- 31: Wilde and the Visual Arts
- Reception
- 32: Rebecca N. Mitchell: Textual History
- 33: Di Cotofan Wu: Wilde in East Asia
- 34: Robert Stilling: Wilde in Africa and the Caribbean
- 35: Kristin Mahoney: Wilde and Camp
- 36: Neil Sammells: Wilde and Pop Culture
About the author
Kate Hext is Associate Professor in Decadent Literature and the Arts at the University of Exeter and Visiting Professor of English at Ewha Womans University. Her published work includes
Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (2024) and a new edition of Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (2025). She is a founding co-editor of the journal
Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures.
Alex Murray is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen's University Belfast and founding co-editor of
Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures (Johns Hopkins University Press). His most recent books include
Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the collection
Decadence: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
