Introduction
Notes Introduction 1. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1989), p. 10. 2. Michel Foucault, An Introduction: Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1978), p. 37. 3. Richard Kaye provides an excellent overview of sexuality-based Wilde schol- arship up to 2004, including the controversy over Christopher Craft’s ‘Alias Bunberry’, which represents The Importance of Being Earnestt as a coded gay text; see Richard Kaye, ‘Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde’, Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 189–223, and Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosocial Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 106–39. The identification of Wilde as unprob- lematically ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ continues, especially in texts that are not centrally engaged with questions of sexuality. Heather Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theoryy (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 10, for instance, identifies Wilde as ‘a gay man’, and Paul L. Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York: Routledge, 2007) consistently uses ‘gay’ throughout his book on the con- sumerist Wilde. 4. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988), p. 277. 5. For intriguing interpretations in the context of Wilde’s subversive politics of precisely the texts I push to the background see Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford University Press, 1996).
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