WILDE NOWreads 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, 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.
Author(s): Pierpaolo Martino
Series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 248
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetics of Masks and Early Performances: Dublin, Oxford, London
1.1 Wilde, Intermediality and Contemporary Popular Culture
1.2 Wilde’s Aesthetics of Masks
1.3 Becoming “Oscar Wilde:” The Dublin Days
1.4 Performing the Oxonian: Oxford to London
1.5 Reading Wilde
2 Genius and Celebrity: Oscar Wilde in America
2.1 Wilde-Salomé by Al Pacino: An American Portrait
2.2 Wilde’s Iconicity
2.3 Becoming a Global Celebrity
3 Wilde Consumerism and the Arts
3.1 Oscar at the End of Two Centuries: Stephen Fry’s Wilde
3.2 The Picture of Dorian Gray: Beauty, Desire, Consumerism and Dissonance
3.3 Lady Windermere's Fan and an Ideal Husband: Consumerism, Style, Scandal and the Arts
3.4 The Importance of Being (Earnest): Queering Wild(ean) Performances
3.5 Consumerism and Beyond: Music, Sound and Listening in Wilde’s Discourse
4 Performing De Profundis
4.1 De Profundis Now
4.2 The Happy Prince by Rupert Everett
4.3 Wilde, Prison and Crime: Gyles Brandreth and the Murders at Reading Gaol
5 On the Wilde Side: Oscar Wilde in Contemporary Pop Culture
5.1 Pop Wilde
5.2 From Velvet Goldmine to ‘Lazarus’: David Bowie and Oscar Wilde
5.3 The Importance of Being Morrissey: Wilde, the Smiths and (Steven Patrick) Morrissey
5.4 Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves: Nick Cave’s Salomé and Gavin Friday’s Ballad of the Reading Gaol
5.5 Wilde Personalities: From the Pet Shop Boys to Pete Doherty
Coda
Bibliography
Index
