Making Oscar Wilde
-
- $24.99
Publisher Description
Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set on two continents, it tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international acclaim. 'Success is a science,' Wilde believed, 'if you have the conditions, you get the result.'
Combining new evidence and gripping cultural history, Michèle Mendelssohn dramatizes Wilde's rise, fall, and resurrection as part of a spectacular transatlantic pageant. With superb style and an instinct for story-telling, she brings to life the charming young Irishman who set out to captivate the United States and Britain with his words and ended up conquering the world. Following the twists and turns of Wilde's journey, Mendelssohn vividly depicts sensation-hungry Victorian journalism and popular entertainment alongside racial controversies, sex scandals, and the growth of Irish nationalism. This ground-breaking revisionist history shows how Wilde's tumultuous early life embodies the story of the Victorian era as it tottered towards modernity. Riveting and original, Making Oscar Wilde is a masterful account of a life like no other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mendelssohn (Henry James), a professor of English at Oxford, peripatetically, and not quite satisfyingly, reexamines Oscar Wilde's self-mythologization, reinvention, and rise to celebrity, mostly in terms of Wilde's 1882 speaking tour of the United States. Straining to broaden the focus from Wilde's own career to a larger cultural context, Mendelssohn emphasizes how the author was caught up in the racial, ethnic, and class anxieties roiling a post Civil War America full of newly arrived immigrants, many from Wilde's native Ireland. After describing Wilde's early life and university career, the book shifts focus to the then-little-known 27-year-old Wilde's time crisscrossing the U.S. talking about the Aesthetic art movement that he so flamboyantly represented. Though Wilde would paint the tour as a success, in fact he often found himself the subject of mockery and hostile scrutiny. Mendelssohn argues that Wilde nevertheless learned twin lessons in perseverance and showmanship that served him in good stead in writing the plays that would subsequently secure his fame. Mendelssohn's study never quite settles, as it tries to meld biography with an expansive cultural history filtered through the lens of Wilde's visit and interactions. Nonetheless, there is much to ponder in Mendelssohn's analysis, whether one agrees with it or not, and it will hopefully inform future discussions of Wilde.
