In Oscar Wilde in Vienna, Sandra Mayer examines the reception and performance history of Oscar Wilde's dramatic works on Viennese stages from the turn of the twentieth century up to the present.
This comprehensive and authoritative collection of Oscar Wilde's American interviews affords readers a fresh look at the making of a literary legend. Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a ...serious writer (at twenty-six years old, he had by then published just one volume of poems), Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts that was organized to publicize a touring opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, which lampooned him and satirized the Aesthetic movement he had been imported to represent. In this year-long series of broadly distributed and eagerly read newspaper interviews, Wilde excelled as a master of self-promotion. He visited major cities from New York to San Francisco but also small railroad towns along the way, granting interviews to newspapers wherever asked. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and reporters noted that he was dressed for the part. He wooed and flattered his hosts everywhere, pronouncing Miss Alsatia Allen of Montgomery, Alabama, the most beautiful young lady he had seen in the United States, adding, This is a remark, my dear fellow, I supposed I have made of some lady in every city I have visited in this country. It could be appropriately made. American women are very beautiful. Confronted at every turn by an insatiable audience of sometimes hostile interviewers, the young poet tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. Seeing America and Americans for the first time, Wilde's perception often proved as sharp as his wit; the echoes of both resound in much of his later writings. His interviewers also succeeded in getting him to talk about many other topics, from his opinions of British and American writers (he thought Poe was America's greatest poet) to his views of Mormonism. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.
Diaries, correspondence, open letters are genres that frequently reveal strategic alliances, affections, intimacies, but that on many occasions also reveal disputes, ruptures and heated ...controversies. Unlike other registries, the personal and intimate nature that has characterized them allows comments to be made public that would otherwise be confined exclusively to a private domain or, in the best of cases, to rumors or juicy gossip.
The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 228 pp., ISBN: 978-1-108-49149-5. Del gran incendio de Roma (64 d.C.), sumamente crítico para lo ...que ocurrirá en el futuro, la autora hace un repaso detallado: el inicio de la catástrofe junto al circo máximo, el siniestro, la llegada de Nerón desde Ancio, las medidas de urgencia, la duración, los destrozos, los supuestos servidores del príncipe que fueron vistos en los barrios incendiados portando antorchas, la supuesta interpretación musical de Nerón contemplando el fuego, los rumores acusadores hacia Nerón, la búsqueda de un chivo expiatorio, el posible papel acusador de los judíos, la gran represión, la primera persecución de los cristianos, el martirio de san Pedro y de san Pablo, etc. Conceptos importantes a diferenciar, que maneja la autora con soltura, son los de Nero redivivus y Nero rediturus: el primero de ellos hace referencia a la creencia de que Nerón volverá, pese a haber fallecido; el segundo recoge la idea de que simplemente «retornará» pues se entiende que sigue vivo y escondido. Sin embargo, destaca Malik, en el resto de su narrativa busca deshacer las tradicionales y hostiles interpretaciones de Nerón, al que creía víctima de la propaganda difundida por escritores posteriores.
Oscar Wilde in Context Powell, Kerry; Raby, Peter
Cambridge University Press eBooks,
12/2013
eBook
Open access
Oscar Wilde was a courageous individualist whose path-breaking life and work were shaped in the crucible of his time and place, deeply marked by the controversies of his era. This collection of ...concise and illuminating articles reveals the complex relationship between Wilde's work and ideas and contemporary contexts including Victorian feminism, aestheticism and socialism. Chapters investigate how Wilde's writing was both a resistance to and quotation of Victorian master narratives and genre codes. From performance history to film and operatic adaptations, the ongoing influence and reception of Wilde's story and work is explored, proposing not one but many Oscar Wildes. To approach the meaning of Wilde as an artist and historical figure, the book emphasises not only his ability to imagine new worlds, but also his bond to the turbulent cultural and historical landscape around him - the context within which his life and art took shape.
Despite growing scholarly interest in how Oscar Wilde’s Irish heritage shaped the form and content of his creative works, critics exploring this area have paid less attention to his three society ...plays than to his fiction and his final play The Importance of Being Earnest. In seeking to rectify that imbalance, this essay first addresses the analytical implications of Wilde’s suggestion in 1893 that his own performed and planned society plays, along with certain works by his countryman George Bernard Shaw, constituted an “Hibernian” or “Celtic School”, whose key goals were to celebrate Henrik Ibsen, to deprecate theatrical censorship, and to extirpate the English “intellectual fogs” of Puritanism and Philistinism. Examining Wilde’s depictions of Puritanism, London society, and English national character in the three plays, the essay argues that their Irish facets turn out to be relatively modest in scale, consisting not of the allegorically encoded political commentaries previous critics claimed to discover in Wilde’s fiction and The Importance of Being Earnest, but instead strategies of plot, characterization, and dialogue designed to alert England to the urgent need “to clear” away its “intellectual fogs”.
And Nothing But the Truth Benda, Bill
Integrative medicine (Encinitas, Calif.)
18, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he came to bear witness to the truth, the Roman prefect asked, "What is truth?", reflecting current claims that truth is not universal, but a reflection of ...relative power and personal vantage point. ...unfortunately, rarely of politics. Because truth requires not selling out, and selling out is and has always been the quickest path to power. ...more so because I've noticed, now that I am again training young physicians, that health care increasingly purports the one way (eg, truth); the one way to diagnose using scoring systems, the one way to treat an infection and for how long, the one way to behave in the hospital, the one way to fill in the EMR.
Now available in paperback, this book offers an innovative revaluation of Oscar Wilde's two collections of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). ...Providing a comprehensive account of Wilde's familiarity with Irish folklore, this study challenges the prevailing consensus that the stories draw heavily on such material. By emphasizing Wilde's own stated views on the subject - and so contesting the assumption that he simply shared the well-documented interests of his parents, Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Wilde ('Speranza') - the book relocates the stories within a variety of literary, cultural, and narrative traditions, both Irish and European. Acknowledging Wilde's often ambivalent and ambiguous statements about his Irish national identity, Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts offers a more nuanced understanding of the importance of Ireland to Wilde's art. The detailed readings of the fairy tales show that despite the stories' continuing appeal to children, Oscar Wilde intended his fairy tales for a predominantly adult audience. The book also demonstrates the ways in which, despite their eerie and disturbing content, these fairy tales reaffirmed conservative values. *** This superb analysis...presents a new and persuasive reading of Wilde's fairy tales...Highly recommended. -- Choice *** A neglected aspect of Wilde's oeuvre comes more clearly into focus in Anne Markey's useful study... -- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The Nineteenth Century.
In the 1890s Oscar Wilde enjoyed one of the most high-profile reputations in Britain; yet, virtually overnight, he was plunged into disgrace and ruin. What were the reasons for this extraordinary ...reversal of fortune? Ashley Robins explores Wilde's motivation in prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry, and elaborates on the precarious legal situation that effectively quashed any prospect of a withdrawal from the lawsuit without dire consequences. He examines the medical and psychiatric aspects of Wilde's two-year imprisonment and reveals -- for the first time and based on the original Home Office records -- the machinations among prison officials and doctors to cover up Wilde's state of health. Wilde's medical history is presented with an expert evaluation of his terminal illness, including a resolution of the syphilis controversy. Robins details Wilde's tangled matrimonial affairs during his imprisonment and goes on to disclose the manoeuvres adopted by friends to secure his early release, citing hitherto unpublished letters to show that bribery of prison personnel was seriously contemplated. The issue of homosexuality is discussed not only in relation to Oscar Wilde but from the broader historical, legal and biological perspective. The author portrays Wilde's character and behaviour through the images he projected onto society, by the strong but mixed public reaction to him, and by the quality of his interpersonal relationships with his wife, family and close friends. Finally, Wilde's personality is assessed using internationally accepted diagnostic criteria; and, in an unusual and innovative experiment, a group of Wildean scholars completed a psychological questionnaire as if they were doing so for Oscar Wilde himself. Drawing on these findings and on his own extensive psychiatric experience, Ashley Robins concludes that Wilde had a disorder of personality that culminated in the final and tragic phase of his life.
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