Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews
University of Illinois Press
Edition: Illustrated, 2010-01-06
EAN 9780252034725, ISBN10: 0252034724
Hardcover, 208 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
This comprehensive and authoritative collection of Oscar Wilde's American interviews affords readers a fresh look at the making of a literary legend. Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer (at twenty-six years old, he had by then published just one volume of poems), Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts that was organized to publicize a touring opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience", which lampooned him and satirized the Aesthetic 'movement' he had been imported to represent.
"Wilde was a source of fascination and provocation, and these assembled portraits reveal the rawness and the refinements, the pride and the anxieties, of American culture in the making during this important period. A vital and valuable book." --Eric Haralson, editor of Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry