This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

This book is the first collection of essays to discuss Oscar Wilde’s love and vast knowledge of philosophy. Over the past few decades, Oscar Wilde scholars have become increasingly aware of Wilde’s love and intimate knowledge of philosophy. Wilde’s “Oxford Notebooks” and his soon-to-be-published “Notebook on Philosophy” all point to Wilde not just as an aesthete, but also as a serious philosophical thinker. The aim of this collection is not to make the statement that Wilde was a philosopher, or that his works were philosophical tracts. Rather, it provides a space to explore any and all linkages between Wilde’s works and philosophical thought. Addressing a broad spectrum of philosophical matter, from classical philology to Daoism, ethics to aestheticism, this collection enriches the literature on Wilde and philosophy alike.

In this walking tour of the city's literary history, Schafer explores Washington's culture, authors, bookstores, colleges, and literary meeting places.

Focuses on figures who saw themselves as part of a Decadent tradition as they revised the concept of the family in the early 20th century.

Oscar Wilde: A Literary Life tracks the intellectual biography of one of the most influential minds of the nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on the dramatic events of Wilde’s life, this volume documents Wilde’s impressive forays into education, religion, science, philosophy, and social reform. In so doing, it provides an accessible and yet detailed account that reflects Wilde’s own commitment to the “contemplative life.” Suitable for seasoned readers as well as those new to the study of his work, Oscar Wilde: A Literary Life brings Wilde’s intellectual investments into sharp focus, while placing him within a cultural landscape that was always evolving and often fraught with contradiction.

Comprehensive volume of international research on the European reception of Oscar Wilde.

This book explores Wilde's works from the hypothesis that they call upon the active participation of the reader in the production of meaning. It has a twofold objective: first, it shows that Wilde's emphasis on the creative role of the audience in his critical writings makes him conceive the reader as a co-creator in the construction of meaning. Second, it analyses the strategies which Wilde employs to impel the reader to collaborate in the creation of meaning of his literary works and casts light upon the social criticism derived from these. The examination of Wilde’s writings reveals how he gradually combined more sophisticated techniques that encouraged the reader's dynamic role with the progressive exploitation of self-advertising strategies for professional purposes. These allowed the ‘commercial’ Oscar to make his works successful among the Victorian public without betraying the ‘literary’ Wilde’s aesthetic principles. The present study re-evaluates Wilde as a critic and as a writer. It demonstrates that, while Wilde the ‘myth’ was ahead of his time in many ways, Wilde the ‘ARTIST’ anticipated in his aesthetic theory various themes which occupy contemporary literary theoreticians. Thus, it may contribute to give him the status he rightly deserves in the history of literature.

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.

Nicholas Frankel presents a revisionary account of Oscar Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile in Europe following his release from an English prison for the crime of gross indecency between men. Despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde—unapologetic and even defiant—attempted to rebuild himself as a man, and a man of letters.

George Egerton: Terra Incognitas is the first published work to focus solely on Egerton and her literary legacy. It covers the range and extent of Egerton's life and literary career from her emergence into the milieu of London publishing in 1893 to her dramatic works (both original and in translation) and their performance history into the 1920s. This work is an essential addition to ongoing recovery projects and is the first to focus on her 'lost' and unpublished works, mentorship of younger writers, her experiments with characterisations and themes, sociopolitical stances, innovations with form and content, and ultimately, her literary legacy. In doing so, George Egerton: Terra Incognitas reassesses Egerton's broader contribution to fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century literature and drama and repositions her as among the most important of the literary innovators of period, and a noteworthy precursor to later female literary modernisers, including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf.