WILDE NOW

‘WILDE NOW is an important contribution to the study of Oscar Wilde as a proto-postmodernist. With this book, Pierpaolo Martino has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the importance of Wilde’s life and works to the development of contemporary music, literature and film. The richness of the research and scholarship that went into the creation of this study is evident in all of the chapters. The analysis of the Wildean strand in modern music is exceptionally rewarding. This volume will undoubtedly be of value to both new and established scholars of Wilde’s life and literary oeuvre’. -Graham Price, Media Studies Lecturer, NUI Maynooth, Author of Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary. WILDE NOW reads Oscar Wilde through our now, through a contemporary sensibility (and approach), in which literature and popular culture interrogate and are interrogated by critical concepts and categories such as performance, celebrity, intermediality, and consumerism. This volume exceeds the shape and meaning of a critical study to turn into a drama of five different acts/moments in Wilde’s life and work: his early performances in Dublin, London and Oxford; the 1882 American tour; his successful season of the first half of the 1890s, his prison years and finally his glorious resurrection in contemporary pop culture. Most importantly WILDE NOW approaches these moments through contemporary rewritings and performances of “Oscar Wilde” in the fields of cinema, music and literature by such artists as Al Pacino, Rupert Everett, Stephen Fry, Gyles Brandreth, David Hare, David Bowie, Morrissey, Nick Cave, Neil Tennant and Gavin Friday. These artists – through their awareness of the importance of being/playing Oscar in their specific worlds and cultural contexts – will also show us that Wilde can be conceived as a subversive, critical role one might successfully perform and appropriate, now more than ever. Pierpaolo Martino is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Bari, Italy. He is the author of Mark the Music: The Language of Music in English Literature from Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie (2012), and co-editor of Oscar Wilde in the Third Millennium: Approaches, Directions, Re-evaluations (2022).