Description
Book SynopsisOscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas.
Trade Review“If Oscar Wilde was, by all accounts, the most desirable guest of his time—magnetic, provocative, and outrageously funny—then Joseph Bristow is, on the evidence of this volume (
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture), the most accomplished host of our own age.” * The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies *
“Authoritative.” * San Francisco Chronicle *
“Though other works have looked at particular cultural aspects of Wilde’s influence…none casts as interesting and broad a cultural net, with as much knowledge and nuance as this volume does.…
Highly recommended.” * CHOICE *
“Joseph Bristow’s
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend brings together a dozen essays, most of which are devoted to illustrating Richard Ellmann’s assertion that ‘Wilde is one of us,‘ and all of which, taken together, richly complicate Ellman’s remark by making clear that
we—the inheritors of Wilde’s life and work—have been an enormously varied group, interpreting and appropriating that legacy with a promiscuously Wildean freedom.” * Victorian Studies *
“This is an impressive and important book that all scholars of Wilde, the
fin-de-siécle, and modernism will find useful.” * Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 *
