The Art of the Pose

by Marcovitch, Heather

• ISBN13: 9783034304399
• ISBN10: 3034304390
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-10-06
• Publisher: Peter Lang Pub Inc

Summary

This book revisits Oscar Wilde's major writings through the field of performance studies. Wilde wrote about performance as a cultural dialectic, as a form of serious and critical play, and as the basis of a subversive poetics. In his studies at Oxford University, his famous lecture tour of the United States and Canada, his friendships with famous actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry, the writing of his critical essays, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome, and his society comedies, and culminating in his post-prison writings De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde develops a rich theory of performance that addresses aesthetics, ethics, identity and individualism. This book also traces Wilde's often-troubled relationship with late-Victorian society in terms of its attempts to define his public performances by stereotyping him as both irrelevant and dangerous, from the early newspaper caricatures to its later description of him as a sexual monster.

Author Biography

Heather Marcovitch is a professor of English at Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada. She has published on late-Victorian literature, modernist literature and television studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. 7
Introduction: Oscar Wilde and Performance Theory	p. 9
Foundations and Experiments: Oscar Wilde at Oxford	p. 23
Celebrity, Caricatures and Public Performances in the 1880s	p. 51
WildeÆs Performance Theory and the Critical Essays	p. 91
Decadent Anxiety and Negative Capabilities: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome	p. 119
The Dialectic of Persona and Stereotypes in the Society Comedies	p. 151
Performance as Redemption in De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol	p. 185
Bibliography	p. 213
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

This book revisits Oscar Wilde's major writings through the field of performance studies. Wilde wrote about performance as a cultural dialectic, as a form of serious and critical play, and as the basis of a subversive poetics. In his studies at Oxford University, his famous lecture tour of the United States and Canada, his friendships with famous actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry, the writing of his critical essays, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome,' and his society comedies, and culminating in his post-prison writings 'De Profundis' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' Wilde develops a rich theory of performance that addresses aesthetics, ethics, identity and individualism. This book also traces Wilde's often-troubled relationship with late-Victorian society in terms of its attempts to define his public performances by stereotyping him as both irrelevant and dangerous, from the early newspaper caricatures to its later description of him as a sexual monster.