Volker is a German traveller waiting for his connecting flight to Namibia in Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport, and it is through him and his wanderings in the airport that Adair grounds the ...onslaught of ironically stereotypical observations about the various people he encounters. Other characters that Volker happens upon in the airport include Charles Grayson Smith Jr, a gay professor of economics at Harvard who "has been accused of plagiarism" (5) by a female student; Jim, who works in the airport curio shop and also likes to call himself Peter because of his resemblance to the well-known "American adventurer, hunter and photographer" (63), Peter Beard; Maria and Velda, two women who work as cleaners but also make artistic pornography in the storage room of the airport's bathrooms with Dick, the director who is "slim and always wears clothes that have a very conspicuous label on them" (109); Karl, a "terrorist, a terrorist clown, a terrorist dwarf, a terrorist with dwarfism" who turns out to have "no cause but his own" (79); and Klint du Toit, a paedophile on whose shaven scalp is visible "the outline of a pink tattooed swastika" (88) and who is sexually involved with his 14-year-old "son who is not his son" (88), George. The reader comes to know, and perhaps even finally empathise with, the somewhat unbearable Volker, who appears to be leaving Germany as an attempt at escaping the pain of either the breakup of a romantic relationship or the death of a lover.
This article examines the conjunction of environmental aesthetics, textile materiality, and notions of the home in the work of the British poet and translator Alfred Hayes (1857–1936). Hayes, who ...authored six collections of poems, has been largely neglected in studies of Victorian poetry, yet his pastoral and religious verse was popular among Victorian and Edwardian readers. Hayes was also closely affiliated with the fin-de-siècle literary scene. He contributed to The Yellow Book, collaborated with Richard Le Gallienne and Norman Gale, and was reviewed by Oscar Wilde. The essay investigates the forms and functions of Hayes’s textile references and allusions to Victorian interiors in the collection The Vale of Arden and Other Poems, which was first published by John Lane at The Bodley Head in 1895. Its lyrics weave together depictions of rural England as a home with imagery inspired by the textures of luxurious fabrics and furnishing objects, thus testing the boundaries of exteriority and interiority. The article first surveys the contents, potential influences, and material design of Hayes’s little-researched book. It links Hayes’s use of poetic form and imagery to late Victorian understandings of organicism in Arts and Crafts design and home decoration. At the centre of the article will be a close reading of Hayes’s poem ‘My Study’. The poem portrays an idyllic landscape as the speaker’s study. It alludes to conceptions of the ‘house beautiful’ and the ‘book beautiful’ as it combines ecopoetic and religious notions of nature as a domestic space and as a site of learning. The article argues that textile ecologies are central to Hayes’s negotiation of relationships between nature and artifice, enabling a distinctive fusion of traditional English pastoral and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. The eco-aesthetic meditations of Hayes’s poetry highlight conceptual links between nature and notions of the dwelling space (‘oikos’), and, at the same time, suggest that material culture, specifically the fin-de-siècle craze for beautiful objects and textures, furnished Victorian nature poetry.
A bold reimagining of the literary history of Decadence through a close examination of the transnational contexts of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.Building upon a large body ...of archival and critical work on Oscar Wilde's only novel, Dorian Unbound offers a new account of the importance of transnational contexts in the forging of Wilde's imagination and the wider genealogy of literary Decadence. Sean O'Toole argues that the attention critics have rightly paid to Wilde's backgrounds in Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has had the unintended effect of obscuring a much broader network of transnational contexts. Attention to these contexts allows us to reconsider how we read The Picture of Dorian Gray, what we believe we know about Wilde, and how we understand literary Decadence as both a persistent, highly mobile cultural mode and a precursor to global modernism. In developing a transnational framework for reading Dorian Gray, O'Toole recovers a subterranean network of nineteenth-century cultural movements. At the same time, he joins several active and vital conversations about what it might mean to expand the geographical reach of Victorian studies and to trace the globalization of literature over a longer period of time. Dorian Unbound includes chapters on the Irish Gothic, German historical romance, US magic-picture tradition, and experimental English epigrams, as well as a detailed history and a new close reading of the novel, in an effort to understand Wilde's contribution to a more dynamic idea of Decadence than has been previously known. From its rigorous account of the broad archive of texts that Wilde read and the array of cultural movements from which he drew inspiration in writing Dorian Gray to the novel's afterlives and global resonances, O'Toole paints a richer picture of the author and his famously allusive prose. This book makes a compelling case for a comparative reading of the novel in a global context. It will appeal to historians and admirers of Wilde's career as well as to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, queer and narrative theory, Irish studies, and art history.
The bachelor has long held an ambivalent, uncomfortable and even at times unfriendly position in society. This book carefully considers the complicated relationships between the modern queer bachelor ...and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957. The seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor (queerness, idolatry, askesis, decadence, the decorative, glamour and artifice) comprise a contested site and reveal in their respective ways the distinctly queer twinning of shame and resistance. It pays close attention to the interiors of Lord Ronald Gower, Alfred Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall, Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, Noël Coward and Cecil Beaton. Richly illustrated and written in a lively and accessible manner, Bachelors of a different sort is at once theoretically ambitious and rich in its use of archival and various historical sources.
File On Wilde Morgan, Margery Mary
2014, 2014-03-10
eBook
Writer Files is an important series documenting the work of major dramatists of the last hundred years Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1856. In the years following his graduation from Oxford in ...1878 he published poems and stories which included The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lady Windermere's Fan was produced in 1892, A Woman of No Importance in 1893 and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. Later work included De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He died in 1900. Each volume contains a comprehensive checklist of all the writer's plays, with a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews and a selection of the writers' own comments on their work.
The discourse of fairy tale narratives operates under three Victorian conventions - a virtue personified beautiful hero, a heterosexual relation, and a happy ending. Working upon these basic ...assumptions, Vladimir Propp identifies an underlying schematic structure, common to every tale, of 31 functions in narratives. Propp divides an enchanted narrative into 31 short plots. These plots are general functions performed by Propps identified seven archetypical characters found at play in every narrative. Propps study is based on 102 Russian folk tales, a sub-category of fairy tales. Oscar Wilde subverts the three aforementioned Victorian conventions in Propps structural model as a conflict between Victorian idealism and stark reality. This study aims to unveil the subverted structural scheme of the Proppian 31-function model in Wildes novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel not only subverts the three fairy tale conventions in its content but also rearranges the Proppian linear scheme of functions in its form. Moreover, the study also explores the repetition and absence of some Proppian functions to delineate the Faust theme of selling ones soul for worldly pleasures for a specific time period, the end of which marks a visceral degeneration of the protagonist.
This text argues that, haunted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde as gay man, writer and self-invented artist, subsequent gay playwrights, working between Wilde and the dawn of gay liberationist theatre, ...were unable to rival his celebrated status as “gay playwright”. It focuses on the work of Noel Coward, Terrence Rattigan and Somerset Maugham and considers how their repressed and marginalized situation as closeted homosexual writers affected their life and work. Bitter, cynical parodies of heterosexual marriage in crisis, farcical portrayals of the impossibility of monogamous attachment, and slapstick promotion of sexual experimentation feature prominently in the popular social comedies of these writers. This text assesses the role of “sublimation” and looks at how contemporary heterosexual audiences responded to them.
Revolutionary Bodies explores Irish literary depictions of homoeroticism and of gay men within a wider Marxist analysis of sexual freedom and how it is imagined for queer people under late ...capitalism. Another is by acknowledging ways that the book would have been "enriched and variegated" by the inclusion of an exploration of the depiction of samesex desire between women by female authors like Kate O'Brien, while nonetheless insisting on the usefulness of a study solely concerned with "how images of gay men circulate in the political imaginary" (12, 13). In these literary works, Cronin points out, Tóibín uses "the conventions of realism to construct gay male characters, and to incorporate those characters into inherited genres and plot types" - such as the bildungsroman or generational narrative - intrinsically linked to the developmental historicism that underpins the bourgeois social order (91). ...the "modern gay men in Tóibín's fiction embody, and experience as liberating, the political rationality and 'realist' 'common sense' characteristic of neoliberal subjectivity" (25-6). ...these affects are particularly condensed, Cronin claims, in the parts of the novels where the male body is portrayed as a location of pleasure and pain that "exists only and always in relation to other bodies" (104). ...politically these novels pull in two directions, Cronin argues.
This article discusses two competing versions of Oscar Wilde's Salomé that were translated into Esperanto indirectly. Salomé was originally written in French and is a retelling of a biblical story. ...The English translation of the play, sometimes taken to be the original, flaunts its biblical heritage, often through direct quotation from the King James Version. However, there was no canonical Bible in Esperanto at the time of translation, making it impossible to achieve equivalent effect by means of parallel intertextual references. The relation between equivalence and intertextuality is just one example of a central issue in the study and practice of translation that is thrown into sharp relief when considering invented languages. Esperanto is in many ways a language of translation, and studying its literature may enrich not only the linguistic scope of translation studies research but also its theoretical apparatus.
PDF
