Oscar Wilde's Profession
Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century
Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small
Price: £76.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-818728-8
Publication date: 23 November 2000
328 pages, 16 halftones & line illus, 216x138 mm
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| Reviews |
| - 'Oscar Wilde's Profession
is essential reading as a bold debunking of those accounts of Wilde which, while claiming to liberate his political agenda, have tended to limit both the man and his oeuvre
... Guy and Small's careful evaluations provide a new benchmark for critical standards in an area dominated by overdetermined theories of sexuality and textuality. They may present a less
attractive Oscar, but they certainly establish a more accurate Wilde that reveals more facets of a myriad-minded complexity.
' - Modern Language Review
- 'Guy and Small's measured assessment of the progressive trajectory of Wilde's career challenges many commonplace myths about his spectacular rise and fall in the cultural arena ... accomplished and highly significant study.' - Modern Language Review
- 'The book is extremely well written, and clear in its approach and aims.' - The Journal of the Oscar Wilde Society
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| Description | | - Uses the evidence of letters, contracts, and publishing documents to explore Wilde's relations with his publishers and his public and to show how thoroughly he was a professional writer.
- Through close examination of his texts reveals Wilde's habits of composition, revision, and 'plagiarism'
| | A materialist account of Wilde's career as a writer, Oscar Wilde's Profession
contests three widely held assumptions about his success: that there is a clear distinction between his life as a journalist and his artistic celebrity; that he was an aesthetic 'purist' in his attitude towards his own books; and that his career was driven by an oppositional sexual or nationalist politics. The
authors bring together evidence from the publishing trade, from Wilde's contracts and correspondence with publishers, and from documentation about his earnings (particularly the plays) to show that he always worked for money, but that he achieved far less financial success than is usually thought. Far from subverting the nascent consumerism of his time, he was thoroughly immersed in its values--in
the commodification of culture in which books became product. At the same time, Oscar Wilde's Profession
provides a uniquely detailed account of Wilde's processes of composition, springing from the re-examination of his writing practice currently being undertaken in the Oxford English Texts edition of his complete work: it surveys his writing practices across the whole of the oeuvre
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radically reinterprets the significance of his revision and 'plagiarism'.
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Readership: Scholars and students of Wilde, and of late nineteenth-century British theatrical and publishing practices
| Contents |
Wilde the writer
The journalist
'Of making many books'
The dramatist
The Bodley Head
Post-prison and posthumous works
The writer at work
Appendix: Wilde's books
Select Bibliography
Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Josephine M. Guy, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, University of Nottingham and
Ian Small, Professor of English Literature, University of Birmingham
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possible at the time the catalogue was compiled.
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