Oscar 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.
Joseph Bristow is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edited the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature from 1997 to 2007. His recent books include The Fin-de-Siècle Poem, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Oscar Wilde: Contextual Conditions, and the variorum edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
“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*
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