Beautiful Untrue Things

Forging Oscar Wilde's Extraordinary Afterlife

AvGregory Mackie

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Beskrivning

Borrowing its title from Oscar Wilde’s essay "The Decay of Lying," this study engages questions of fraudulent authorship in the literary afterlife of Oscar Wilde. The unique cultural moment of Wilde’s early-twentieth-century afterlife, Gregory Mackie argues, afforded a space for marginal and transgressive forms of literary production that, ironically enough, Wilde himself would have endorsed. Beautiful Untrue Things recovers the careers of several forgers who successfully inhabited the persona of the Victorian era’s most infamous homosexual and arguably its most successful dramatist.

More broadly, this study tells a larger story about Oscar Wilde’s continued cultural impact at a moment when he had fallen out of favour with the literary establishment. It probes the activities of a series of eccentric and often outrageous figures who inhabited Oscar Wilde’s much-mythologized authorial persona – in forging him, they effectively wrote as Wilde – in order to argue that literary forgery can be reimagined as a form of performance. But to forge Wilde and generate "beautiful untrue things" in his name is not only an exercise in role-playing – it is also crucially a form of imaginative world-making, resembling what we describe today as fan fiction.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2019-05-16
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:304
Filformat:PDF
Kopieringsskydd:LCP
ISBN:9781487516260
Förlag:University of Toronto Press

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Mer om författaren

Gregory Mackie is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and the Norman Colbeck curator of rare books at the University of British Columbia.

Recensioner i media

"The study illuminates in meticulous detail the paradoxical relationship between forgery and authenticity in the Wildean sense: a good fake makes a good original. In four chapters Mackie maps out the structures of the meta-canon of Wilde's literary afterlife."- Katharina Herold (The Wildean) "Beautiful Untrue Things offers an insightful and fascinating exploration of Wilde's many afterlives. Through well-selected case studies, Mackie illuminates key forgers, while introducing a myriad of others for further and future exploration. For readers new to Wilde and unfamiliar with his literary and theatrical oeuvre, Mackie offers necessary background to introduce his life and writing. For scholars of Wilde, Victorian literature, or Modernism, Beautiful Untrue Things provides an incisive discussion of this key figure, by both resituating him within his cultural context and reframing him for twenty-first century readers." - Brittany Reid (The Ormsby Review) "Mackie's study is certainly both extensively researched and beautifully written; his own fandom may be sensed in his allusive prose and clever headings. This book represents a substantial contribution to the study of Wilde's afterlife and itself demonstrates the attraction of adding to Wilde's story." - Aaron Eames (Romance, Revolution & Reform) "Beautiful Untrue Things offers an insightful and fascinating exploration of Wilde's many afterlives. Through well-selected case studies, Mackie illuminates key forgers, while introducing a myriad of others for further and future exploration. For readers new to Wilde and unfamiliar with his literary and theatrical oeuvre, Mackie offers necessary background to introduce his life and writing. For scholars of Wilde, Victorian literature, or Modernism, Beautiful Untrue Things provides an incisive discussion of this key figure, by both resituating him within his cultural context and reframing him for twenty-first century readers. By focusing on the forgers rather than the forged subject, Mackie details the processes of myth-making and not their hagiographic results."- Brittany Reid (The Ormsby Review)

Innehållsförteckning

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Truth of Fakes 1. The Importance of Being Authentic2. The Picture of Dorian Hope 3. Pen, Pencil, and Planchette 4. The Devoted FraudConclusion: The Teacher of Fandom NotesBibliography