This book documents how Oscar Wilde was appropriated as a fictional character by no less than thirty-two of his contemporaries, including such celebrated writers as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker.

"The different cultures from which the middle ages drew its inspiration are represented: Cu Cuchulainn from the Celtic world, Apollonius of Tyre from Greek romance, Attila the Hun and Theodoric the Ostrogoth from the struggle of the Roman empire against the Barbarians. Each entry gives an outline of the story, how it spread through Europe, its modern retelling and appearances in art, and a selective bibliography."--Jacket.

The Aesthetic and Decadent Movement of the late 19th century spawned the idea of "Art for Art's Sake," challenged aesthetic standards and shocked the bourgeosie. From Walter Pater's study, "The Renaissance to Salome, the truly decadent collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, Karl Beckson has chosen a full spectrum of works that chronicle the British artistic achievement of the 1890s. In this revised edition of a classic anthology, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" has been included in its entirety; the bibliography has been completely updated; Professor Beckson's notes and commentary have been expanded from the first edition published in 1966. The so-called Decadent or Aesthetic period remains one of the most interesting in the history of the arts. The poetry and prose of such writers as Yeats, Wilde, Symons, Johnson, Dowson, Barlas, Pater and others are included in this collection, along with sixteen of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings.

This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography since the eighteenth century. Discussing female literary figures including Hall, Wharton, Nin, "Reage," Jong, and Shulman; such men as Cleland, Sade, Beardsley, Lawrence, Joyce, and Miller; and film makers such as Brakhage, Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Bertolucci, Oshima, and Wertmuller; Michelson analyzes both the use of aesthetic pornography and the philosophical, cultural, and legal implications of its use. He proposes that realizing the obscene --in the sense of speaking the unspeakable-- is the principle aesthetic function of pornography.

Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the vegetable monsters of twentieth-century science fiction and the movies, comics, and video games of the present day. Our interest in hothouses can be traced back to the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it was only in the early nineteenth century that a boom in exotic plant collecting and new glasshouse technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets, and artists, and the hothouse entered the creative language in a highly charged way. Decadent writers in England and Europe—including Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde—transformed the hothouse from a functional object to a powerful metaphor of metropolitan life, sexuality, and being replete with a dark underside of decay and death; and of consciousness itself, nurtured and dissected under glass. In a study as wide-ranging, vivid, and beautiful as our beloved exotic blooms themselves, Jane Desmarais charts the history and influence of these humid, tropical worlds and their creations, providing a steamy window onto our recent past.

First published in 1967. These essays illustrate the movement of ideas in the literary and artistic history of the later part of the nineteenth century. The subjects dealt with are diverse though interrelated. All the contributors exemplify the changing thought of the period from Romanticism, through Victorianism to Symbolism. This title will be of interest to students of art history and literature.

An intriguing exploration of the enduring significance of the world's great myths--from the dawn of time to the present day As ancient as speech, as essential as law, myths are the stories we tell to find our identity in the cosmos. It is through mythology that we attempt to unravel not only the meaning of our actions and impulses but the significance of human existence itself. Now in Living Myths, classical scholar J. F. Bierlein explores the enduring patterns and messages of myths from every culture. Myths, writes Bierlein, are "the eternal mirror in which we see ourselves." Living Myths delves behind the mirror and brings to light the imperishable and transcendent forces common to the myths of the world. Juxtaposing myths of fathers and sons--the Greek myth of Athamas and Phrixus, the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, the Algonquin tale of Grandfather, Father, and Son--Bierlein uncovers essential lessons about human nature and divine will. In the Indian story of Nala and Damayanti, the Greek legends of Aphrodite, and the haunting Irish tale of Etain, Bierlein examines the transforming mystery of romantic love. Here too are tales of the world's great heroes--the Greek Theseus, the Irish Cuchulainn, and the Mexican Quetzalcoatl--and their common desire to break through the masks of appearances. Steeped in wisdom, brimming with insights into human nature and behavior, Living Myths is a luminous exploration of the meaning of mythology through the ages and today in each of our lives.

Volume IV of the Oxford English Texts Complete Works of Oscar Wilde is the first variorum edition of Wilde's major critical writing; it includes the critical essays which were re-published in book-form in his life-time - that is, those anthologised in Intentions and The Soul of Man - as well as his graduate essay usually known by the title The Rise of Historical Criticism, but which this volume titles Historical Criticism. The Introduction gives a detailed account of the composition of each of the essays: it gives a new explanation for the relationship between the 'The Decay of Lying' and 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison' (arguing that they are best understood as companion pieces); it provides the first concrete demonstration that Wilde did, on occasions, knowingly 'copy' his own work; and it reveals that substantial cuts were made to some of Wilde's essays (without his full consent) by the periodical editors with whom he worked. The edition also provides, for the first time, a full collation of the textual variants between the published versions of Wilde's essays (that is, both book and periodical), and all extant manuscripts; in addition it establishes a new, authoritative text for Historical Criticism, based on an examination of the original manuscript, which differs significantly from that printed by Robert Ross in his 1908 Collected Edition (and subsequently reprinted in the Collins Complete Works). The annotation to the edition reveals the full extent of Wilde's 'borrowings' both from his own work, and from other writers; it also reveals that much of Historical Criticism is in fact paraphrasing or translating well-known classical texts, and that the some of denseness of the argument is due to ellipses in Wilde's text that were disguised by earlier editors.