Oscar Wilde Books

This is an exciting and brilliantly conceived work that ties together literary criticism and legal theory with great assurance. Indispensable for scholars of James Joyce in particular, but should be of interest to anybody thinking about the status of law and literature in the twentieth century.

Wonderful for all interested in Oscar Wilde -- and to all fascinated by the struggle for balance between art and life.

Scott Wilson is really weaving together three narratives and three sets of interests here. First, he is interested in telling the story of the rapid rise of Cultural Materialism (known in the US as New Historicism)in the 1980's & 1990's; secondly, he is telling the story of how dominant this new discipline has become in his own field of interest, Shakespeare Studies; and thirdly, he is telling the story of how politicized literary study has become as a result of cultural materialism's success.

Rise of the Discipline:

The seminal figure in the rise of cultural materialism is Raymond Williams, especially the Raymond Williams that was influenced by Althusser's views on the "materiality" of ideology. In fact cultural materialism is an offshoot, or another stage in the ongoing evolution of, cultural studies.
I think one could argue that there is very little difference between Cultural Studies and Cultural Materialism--both are New Left projects interested in the liberatory politics of dissident groups and so the research agendas of both schools are informed by a desire to effect change in society by effecting a change in the way we (scholars, students, citizens) practice culture. One key difference is that while Cultural Studies is informed by a marxist focus on class; Cultural Materialism is a postmarxist discipline that theorizes culture from a number of alternative positions and perspepctives.

The fact that universities are "liberal" is nothing new but the politicizing/radicalizing of the university by the many-tiered front of the New Left has provoked outrage from neo-conservatives who believe the cultural heritage of the west should not be turned into an ideological battleground. The right, Prince Charles for one, believe that the New Left has ruined Shakespeare.

Interestingly enough, however, not all of the criticism against Cultural Materialism or New Historicism has come from the right. As with any New Left project much of the criticism of cultural materialism has come from within its own ranks (dissent from its own dissident readers).

One of the seminal figures of cultural materialism is Michel Foucault (especially the seventies Foucault of _History of Sexuality_) and one of the more radical tiers of the New Left is Queer Studies. Terry Eagleton is one of the more traditional marxists who finds that this particular branch of New Historicism/Cultural Materialism often fetishizes difference for difference sake and that in its search for evidence of sexual oppression and its concomitant search for ever more nuanced varieties of sexual expression real politics have been lost sight of.

Wilson, whose own views are obviously informed by Queer Studies (namely by Dollimore and Sinfield's _Political Shakespeare_), counters that charge.

Interestingly enough one of Wilson's favorite thinkers, Slavoj Zizek, is also skeptical of the New Left and programs that fetishize difference/differance.

Perhaps the most comprehensive criticism of Cultural Materialism, and one that Wilson articulates very well, is that each practitioner can be perceived to be forging their own sometimes highly eclectic and eccentric relationship to cultural products and/or historical epochs and that the work being done under the aegis of Cultural Materialism can be perceived to be many separate scholars each narrating their own personal relationships with Shakespeare or the Renaissance. This charge/criticism is most specifically leveled at New Historicist star Stephen Greenblatt. (And this charge could be leveled at Scott Wilson as well).

Impact on Shakespeare Studies:

The star of Cultural Materialism/New Historicism is without a doubt Stephen Greenblatt and it is fascinating to read Wilson's synopsis of Greenblatt's career. According to Wilson Greenblatt's interest in the past arose out of a childhood fantasy to speak with the dead and that Greenblatt's famous essays are so many attempts to resurrect the past and make it speak. But this highly personal and eccentric approach to history is nothing new, and so this anectdote about Greenblatt is not meant as a criticism. According to Wilson historians have always been poets as much as anything else and that any pretense to objectivity or neutrality is just that, a pretense. For Wilson the Cultural Materialist no longer has to feign disinterestedness from his/her subject matter. In fact, Wilson argues, many Cultural Materialists would encourage scholars to empathize with dissident groups (past and present) and that this empathy is an essential ingredient in the Cultural Materialist project. The idea being that new critical perspectives are formed by forging new affiliations/attachments.

This is certainly not your Father's history-telling, but that is just the point. Cultural materialism is an intervention into the usual Patriarchal history-telling program/agenda. Cultural materialism is meant to disrupt those old programs and agendas (that served kings and princes) and replace them with new programs and agendas(that serve the interests of those who have been marginalized by traditional literary study and history-telling). Wilson is careful to say that problematizing the Father's history by empathizing with various "others" is not the same thing as attempting to speak for those "others" who must remain voiceless and unnarrated. This would be an account that describes some but not all Cultural Materialists for not all Cultural Materialists are working within the same poststurcturalist and postmodernist template. In fact some are not working within that template at all.

Wilson's own readings of Shakespeare's plays (Tempest, Merchant of Venice, Lear) read like de-constructions of what previous Shakespeare scholars have tried to construct: the traditional patriarchical historical scholar has treated Shakepeare's plays as transhistorical narratives espousing eternal "truths". The cultural materialist, on the other hand, is always careful to situate Shakespeare and the plays in their specific historical context and to read them as responses to specific historical contingencies. For instance, according to Wilson's Lacanian/Zizekian reading, Lear is motivated by a feeling that he lacks a mother-nurturer (umbilical connection to earth, connection to the real) and that he wants Cordelia to fill this lack and provide that connection. But since there is a communication breakdown between these two opposing (masculine and feminine) world views/realities/narratives misunderstanding and tragedy ensues. For Wilson Lear's search for a missing mother (representative of the actual, the real, and perhaps a more organic culture) problematizes his relation to the symbolic order that he is supposed to embody. The cultural materialist is always sifting through accepted opinion about Shakespeare and Shakespeare's plays to find the real historical conditions each play can be seen to be negotiating. In Lear, Wilson argues, Shakepseare is negotiating England's shift from a sedentary organic community to a more abstracted and regulated form of community that must be constructed and mediated by language.

Cultural Materialism thus is not so much an attempt to tell new histories or to tell untold histories (though it is, in part, that) but an attempt to show that the conditions of possibility for any work of art are one and the same material conditions of possibility shaping every other apsect of life at any given moment in time.

The Politicized Realm:

To the Cultural Materialist, or at leat to the Lacan and Zizek influenced Scott, the "Histories" that our literary forebears told are often misrepresented by literary critics. The cultural materialist attempts to lift the veils of the various critical ideologies that have mediated our direct access to the literary objects of the past and to "history".

Thus Fredric Jameson's famous "always historicize" to a Cultural Materialist takes on ever keener and more naunced meanings. For the cultural materialist there are no transhistorical truths or transhistorical histories, only contingent truths and histories. And thus while each cultural materialist historicizes his/her Shakespeare, each cultural materialist is also aware of their own historical situatedness and the historical situatedness of their own methods/theories. And any attempt to negotiate our way into the past is always also an attempt to negotiate or find some purchase upon the present.

In Conclusion:

This book is not perfect. Scott often moves from topic to topic a little too swiftly for my taste(perhaps in imitation of Zizek). Even though Scott's own interpretive habits are highly eclectic and maybe a bit too eccentric at times (his use of Bataille just seems to confuse matters), it would seem eclecticism and eccentricity to the Cultural Materialist are virtues and not liabilites. I used this book to introduce myself to this discipline, and though I found myself skimming in some areas I found it provided me with a fairly good foundation for further exploration in this field. I plan to move on to Alan Sinfield's Faultlines next.

Written as a letter to Bosie, De Profundis shows an author at the peak of his powers, yet tragically already fallen. Anger, disgust, revulsion, joy, reflection - in many ways a total separation from the glib and cocky literature that made him famous - the full gamut of a humbled man. Even missing the cheeky humor and quick turn of phrase there is still a solid thread of consistency entombed in De Profundis, that of salvation. From the grace evident in his fairy tales to the recognition of inner justice in Dorian Gray, Wilde flirted with the themes of the Divine and of sacrifice. This is one of the finest, and most powerful, personal essays ever committed to paper. No collection, or indeed beginnings of understanding, of Wilde can possibly be complete without it.

This edition contains the two best pieces of Wilde's writing. The poem "Ballad" is strong in its sense of poetry and imagery without being sing-songy. De Profundis, while a little difficult to wade through at certain points, simply captures many of life's truths and sets them down in the written word, to be studied, remembered and savored all at once.

And of course it comes in a tongue which was not his own.

But neither was the anglo, actually . . .

This very fine selection and translation of some of Mr. Wilde's greatest and most moving (and moral) short stories includes of course The Happy Prince, the Selfish Giant, the Nightingale and the Rose, and the Remarkable Rocket (whose wonderful title does soften somewhat in translation to Spanish), but also the Canterville Ghost and the Devoted Friend.

Yes, these are tales and fairy tales with a moral. The introduction in fact notes this irony, that one falsely accused of crimes of immorality (when he was in fact merely exposing their prevalence among the British aristocracy) wrote beautiful and moral lessons.

THe introduction to this collection is indeed excellent, covering seveal pages, and divided into several sections, discussing an overview of the controversial figure, his family roots among Catholic Irish nationalists, including Lady Wilde, who chose subversively to raise him well and Protestant and send him on to Oxford in England. Thus this introduction (which amply serves as biography and commentary) also examines his education and his time at Oxford, followed by his career as professional dandy (the Spanish using precisely this term) investigating the English ruling class. We then look at his American ADventure during his lecture tour through an amused New York and a bemused Colorado and a glorious San Francisco of Mark Twain's time. The introduction then considers his marriage and his work, from which much of these early stories arise. Yes, the infamous Wilde was in fact a family man, with two boys and a loving wife at home, for whose loss he spent in anguished mourning his time in exile after his unjust and cruel and unusual imprisonment for a crime he did not commit, but merely reported, this love which dare not say its name also considered here in the introduction.

The introduction also considers his critical work, for like Poe, not only was Wilde well known in his field but also wrote critically of the art and science of writing. We therefore turn to a section of the introduction considering the world of love and beauty, followed by the Passion and Death of the Misunderstood Artist, in the terms of the introduction.

In brief we must turn to Spain to find a true and objective evaluation of the work of Oscar Wilde, and this excellent selection of some of his most popular tales. The price of the introduction alone is worth it; the annotations to the tales are a treasure without price, and the further sections are icing upon a very rich cake. Essential for any understanding of this great Irish artist and subversive hero who so completely exposed an oppressive empire that it wreaked fatal vengeance upon him. Yet his art will forever stand, and, here, better understood and appreciated. Read these tales of morality to your loved ones, and even to yourself.

See also The Soul of Man & Prison Writings, The Oscar Wilde Collection (The Importance of Being Earnest / The Picture of Dorian Gray / An Ideal Husband / Lady Windermere's Fan), and Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics) and The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by his grandson Merlin. See also Son of Oscar Wilde by his son.

In fact this may be the first and greatest and most ethical of the small cottage industry of "cute" sound bites of Mr. Wilde taken far out of context and of sometimes dubious source. Mr. Wilde's son provides and excellent preface describing the limitations and dangers of this exercise and a wonderful insight to his amazing father. The editor then sums up his strategy in meeting the challenges to this enterprise, specifically the need to check the veracity of people claiming Mr. Wilde said such and such in conversation (many of these similar books have tepid sayings claimed to have been heard in conversation. Joyce suffered similarly with Frank Budgeon, and of course Mark Twain had EVERYTHING ascribed to him including the weather). They also address the difficulty of taking lines from Mr. Wilde's plays and novel, in which a CHARACTER while IN CHARACTER says a certain thing which some later call a saying of Mr. WIlde. Mr. Wilde in his own voice may have said it differently, but let the character with all their defects faults and characteristics speak such eccentric foolishness as a character development device. THe editor and Mr. Wilde's son wonderfully explore all the pitfalls of this project and then deliver the most perfect and comprehensive collection possible, ever, possibly the motherlode for all the later fashionable and dubious and cutely illustrated and superficial later throwaways.

An excellent collection, substantial and worth keeping for re-reading and reflection. THe most complete of its miserable kind. Please nevertheless read the originals within their intended contexts rather than these naked soundbites, including Mr. Wilde's very insightful body of artistic criticisms.

P. Craig Russell's pen makes sparks fly as it gives depth, color and life to every brilliant fold and cascade and ripple of luxury. More sparks fly as the pen portrays the poor and the raggled: the thinness of their bones, the dirtiness of their quarters, and, most poignantly of all, the pitiably concave looks on their scrawny faces. P Craig Russel makes Oscar Wilde's otherwise beautiful fairytales into something far beyond beautiful. The magic of the words and glistening sketches combined are enough to make one weep or wonder at the miracle of someone so talented as P. Craig Russell, and someone so talented as Oscar Wilde. Please buy this book knowing that it will bring you a treat like you have never experienced.

P. Craig Russell is one of the top artists working in the genre of the graphic novel today. His latest visual storytelling triumph in a series of marvelous adaptions of the fables and fairytales of Oscar Wilde flawlessly published by NMB Press is Fairy Tales Of Oscar Wilde: The Devoted Friend and The Nightingale And The Rose. Russell works his detailed and "museum quality" artistry to his usual high standards in the retelling of Oscar Wilde's original and imaginative stories. Readers of all ages will enjoy and treasure both the stories and the artistry of this outstanding graphic novelization. (...)

In this selection of Wilde's aphorisms and epigrams culled from his plays, novels, stories, reviews and letters, as well as from hitherto unpublished material, Owen Dudley Dewards fully conveys the breadth and humanity of Wilde's mind and, in an introductory essay, he shows the place of Wilde's pyrotechnics in his thought and in his art. He sees that fireworks decade, the 1890s, as strikingly symbolized by Wilde's style as it was dominated by his life. For those familiar with Wilde's work this book provides an invaluable collection of his inimitable utterances; for others it will be the perfect introduction to Wilde the man.