Arriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had “nothing to declare but my genius." But as this sparkling narrative reveals, Wilde was, rarely for him, underselling ...himself. A chronicle of his sensational eleven-month speaking tour of America, Declaring His Genius offers an indelible portrait of both Oscar Wilde and the Gilded Age. Neither Wilde nor America would ever be the same.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is now widely recognised not only as one of the most representative figures of the British fin de siècle, but as one of the most influential Anglophone authors of the ...nineteenth century. In Britain Wilde suffered a long period of comparative neglect following the scandal of his conviction for 'gross indecency' in 1895; and it is only recently that his works have been reassessed. But while Wilde was subjected to silence in Britain, he became a European phenomenon. His famous dandyism, his witticisms, paradoxes and provocations became the object of imitation and parody; his controversial aesthetic doctrines were a strong influence not only on decadent writers, but also on the development of symbolist and modernist cultures. This collection of essays by leading international scholars and translators traces the cultural impact of Oscar Wilde's work across Europe, from the earliest translations and performances of his works in the 1890s to the present day.
Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedySaloméhas had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture.Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgressionis the ...first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism andSaloméas a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde'sSalomémarks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde andSaloméare seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarmé, Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.
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.
Pretende-se com este trabalho interpretar a noção de hedonismo em O Retrato de Dorian Gray,o único romance escrito por Oscar Wilde, no texto de partida e nos dois textos de chegada com maior número ...de edições em Portugal: a tradução de Januário Leite e a de Margarida Vale de Gato. Num primeiro momento, é analisado o conceito geral de hedonismo e o significado deste para Oscar Wilde, bem como exemplos concretos relacionados com tal doutrina filosófico-moral no texto de partida. Num segundo momento, é abordado o estatuto do autor no sistema de partida e no sistema de chegada, através de um breve estudo da sua recepção literária. Para avaliação da fortuna literária da obra em Portugal, procedeu-se adicionalmente a uma pesquisa atenta do histórico das mais de 30 publicações no nosso país, desde a primeira tradução feita no Brasil e posteriormente publicada em Portugal. São também esclarecidas as razões que levaram as editoras a apostar em várias edições e reimpressões dessa tradução da obra. Num terceiro momento, são dados a conhecer os perfis dos tradutores em foco, e, por fim, é feita uma comparaçãoentre os dois textos de chegada. Procura-se pôr em evidência em que medida o tradutor, como leitor e intérprete do texto de partida, o transforma, condicionado pelas suas vivências, pelo público a quem se dirige e pela época em que se insere. Por último, o presente estudo visa encontrar a resposta para a questão: de que forma o hedonismo de Wilde foi transfigurado, ao sabor dos tempos, das vontades das editoras, dos tradutores e dos leitores, na época do Estado Novo, com a tradução de Januário Leite, e, nofinal do século XX, com a de Margarida Vale de Gato.
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.
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.
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”.