palgrave advances in oscar wilde studies Palgrave Advances Titles include: Phillip Mallett (editor) THOMAS HARDY STUDIES Lois Oppenheim (editor) SAMUEL BECKETT STUDIES Jean-Michel Rabaté (editor) JAMES JOYCE STUDIES Frederick S. Roden (editor) OSCAR WILDE STUDIES Forthcoming: Patrick Finney (editor) INTERNATIONAL HISTORY Marnie Hughes-Warrington (editor) WORLD HISTORIES Robert Patten and John Bowen (editors) CHARLES DICKENS STUDIES Anna Snaith (editor) VIRGINIA WOOLF STUDIES Nicholas Williams (editor) WILLIAM BLAKE STUDIES Jonathan Woolfson (editor) RENAISSANCE HISTORIOGRAPHY Palgrave Advances Series Standing Order ISBN 1–4039–3512–2 (Hardback) 1–4039–3513–0 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in the case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England palgrave advances in oscar wilde studies edited by frederick s. roden university of connecticut Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Frederick S. Roden, 2004 All chapters © Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St Martin’s Press LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-2148-2 ISBN 978-0-230-52430-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230524309 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palgrave advances in Oscar Wilde studies / edited by Frederick S. Roden. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900––Criticism and interpretation––History. 2. Authors, Irish––Biography––History and criticism. 3. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900––Chronology. I. Roden, Frederick S., 1970– PR5824.P28 2004 828'.809––dc22 2004046699 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 For my family: Arlene and Donald Roden and Joseph Portanova This page intentionally left blank contents list of illustrations ix acknowledgments x notes on contributors xi chronology xiv david rose introduction 1 1. biographies 6 joseph bristow 2. wilde the writer 36 anne margaret daniel 3. performance theory and performativity 72 francesca coppa 4. aestheticism and aesthetic theory 96 allison pease 5. oscar wilde, commodity, culture 119 dennis denisoff 6. philosophical approaches to interpretation of oscar wilde 143 philip smith 7. religion 167 patrick r.o’malley 8. gay studies / queer theory and oscar wilde 189 richard a. kaye viii palgrave advances in oscar wilde studies 9. oscar wilde and feminist criticism 224 margaret diane stetz 10. oscar wilde: nation and empire 246 noreen doody selected bibliography 267 index 275 list of illustrations Figure 1, “Ye Rising son-fl ower,” from Ye Soul Agonies of Ye Life of Oscar Wilde 16 Figure 2, “A Symphony in colour,” from Ye Soul Agonies of Ye Life of Oscar Wilde 17 ix acknowledgments Special thanks go to several people at Palgrave Macmillan: first to Eleanor Birne and Rebecca Mashayekh, present at the time of the book’s commissioning; next to Emily Rosser, Paula Kennedy, and Chase Publishing Services who saw this project through. All were kind, helpful, and kept their sense of humor. An editor of a volume of this kind must warmly thank his contributors for producing such fine chapters to work with – and for their patience during revisions and promptness in meeting deadlines. Particular gratitude goes to D.C. Rose for consultation on the Selected Bibliography, as well as his contribution of a thorough chronology. One must also acknowledge the entire thriving Wilde studies enterprise, which has given us, in the past 125 years, so much wonderful material to work with. For a book of this type, we should really thank (posthumously) a writer whose life and creations provoke such a degree of response. As the Palgrave Advances is published on the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth, we look forward to a future of growth in Wilde studies. We are particularly indebted to the way that his grandson, author/editor Merlin Holland, continues to provide rich resources for his fellow scholars to cultivate. As editor of this volume, I sincerely thank my teachers, colleagues, students, family, and friends for giving me so much to think about concerning Oscar Wilde, and for indulging my own Wildean appetites. Thank you for being there, and for your patience during the preparation of the Palgrave Advances. I appreciate now (as never before) the work of an editor. x notes on the contributors Joseph Bristow is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His recent books include Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (University of Toronto Press, 2003). His variorum edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Francesca Coppa is Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where she teaches twentieth-century dramatic literature, sexuality theory, and performance studies. She has written and lectured widely on the playwright Joe Orton and the larger epigrammatic British comedy tradition. She is the editor of a three-volume collection of Orton’s early works and Joe Orton: A Casebook (Routledge, 2003). Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature and history at Princeton and at the New School University. Her publications include essays on Yeats, Wilde, Kipling, Eliot, Woolf, Fitzgerald, and Auden. She is currently working on a book about cultural and literary representations of redheads. Dennis Denisoff teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto. He is the author of Sexual Parody and Aestheticism: 1840–1940 (Cambridge U P, 2001) and Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film: 1850–1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). His second novel, The Winter Gardeners, was published in 2003 (Coach House Press). Noreen Doody is a lecturer in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin, where she specializes in the literature and culture of the late nineteenth century and in contemporary Irish literature. Her recent articles include “‘An Echo of Someone Else’s Music’: The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats” (The Importance of Reinventing xi xii palgrave advances in oscar wilde studies Oscar: Versions of Wilde During the Last 100 Years; Rodopi, 2002) and “Oscar Wilde: Landscape, Memory, and Imagined Space” (Irish Landscapes; Universidad de Burgos, 2004). She is currently working on a critical study of the influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats. Richard A. Kaye is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (Virginia, 2002) and Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination (Columbia, forthcoming). He has edited the new Riverside edition of The Portrait of Dorian Gray (Houghton Mifflin) and, with the late Charles Bernheimer, a collection of essays entitled The Queen of Decadence: Salome in Modern Culture (Chicago, forthcoming). Patrick R. O’Malley is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is currently working on a book exploring the uses of gothic rhetoric and narrative in nineteenth-century British constructions of Catholicism and sexual difference. Allison Pease is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge U P, 2000), and an assistant editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture. Frederick S. Roden is Assistant Professor of English at University of Connecticut. He is the author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). He is at work with Philip Healy on a translation/edition of Marc-André Raffalovich’s 1896 Uranisme et Unisexualité. D.C. Rose read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford and Arts Administration at University College Dublin. While attached to the Department of English at Goldsmiths College, London, he founded The Oscholars (June 2001) intended as a monthly newsletter to keep Wilde scholars in touch with one another. This has now expanded into an e- journal <http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/oscholars>, updated monthly, of Wilde and fin-de-siècle studies. Philip Smith teaches in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. With Michael S. Helfand, he co-authored and co-edited Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (1989). He has also written articles on Wilde, Constance Naden, Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin, Brian Aldiss, August Wilson, John Galsworthy, Charles Olson, notes on the contributors xiii and on issues of curriculum, staffing, and teaching in the profession of English studies. He is editor of the forthcoming Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde (Modern Language Association).