Joseph Bristow – författare

'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.'When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay.Ever since its first publication in 1890 Wilde's only novel has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. Combining elements of the supernatural, aestheticism, and the Gothic, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an unclassifiable and uniquely unsettling work of fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

`The love of adventure, and of mystery, and of a good fight lingers in the minds of men and women.' Thus wrote Andrew Lang in 1887, and the enduring popularity of a genre that was in its heyday at the turn of the century shows no sign of waning.This anthology brings together 23 of the best adventure stories from the zenith of Empire to our present, fragmented, post-colonial world. Pitched against the unknown, against the forces of nature and against man's own treachery, the protagonists' courage and heroism are put to the test. In settings that range from desert islands to the Java Sea, from war-torn Europe to deepest Africa, heroes battle not only for self-preservation but in defence of country and culture. As the old certainties faded with the loss of empire, so moral complexity and literary sophistication grew, and the very notion of `adventure' is challenged in fine stories by Paul Bowles, Tim O'Brien, and Margaret Atwood.

Nineteenth-Century Women Poets is a major new anthology, turning a wide focus on a period which has traditionally had only its most eminent writers examined in any depth. Beginning with Anna Laetitia Barbauld's petition to William Wilberforce and ending with the myth-making Irish writers of the Celtic revival, this wide-ranging collection brings to light diverse female traditions that have for years remained in obscurity. While Nineteenth-Century Women Poets showcasts a host of female writers well-known in their day - Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti - it resists the narrow focus upon familiar middle-class authors taken by other anthologies of this period and contains works by working-class, colonial and political writers, in addition to the better-known names. The anthology draws on first editions for texts wherever possible, retaining the spelling and punctuation of the originals for a faithful representation.The chronological progression of the title highlights the development of women's verse from the late Romantic period through to the Victorian fin-de-siècle, examining the political formations and cultural groupings to which the women belonged, along with the structures which made the development of their work possible, in particular the numerous minority journals which allowed them a coherent voice. The collection also explores the thematic connections between different writers, through a consideration of common preoccupations with marriage, slavery, military conflict, national identity, and religious and sexual discourses, and reveals how styles and genres changed across the century.

This is the first variorum edition of the 1890 and 1891 editions of Oscar Wilde's controversial novel, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. Drawing on manuscripts and a typescript, this volume reprints the thirteen-chapter and twenty-chapter versions of Wilde's narrative as separate works, enabling the reader to see the considerable changes that Wilde made to his famous story across a period of eighteen months. This variorum edition contains a comprehensive introduction that provides full bibliographical information about the two editions, as well as a detailed commentary that illuminates the extraordinarily wide range of references that Wilde makes to a broad repertoire of sources. This volume will be the definitive edition of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' for many years to come.

Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This book offers a new history of the fairy tale, revealing the creative role of periodical publication in shaping this popular genre. Sumpter explores the fairy tale's reinvention for (and by) diverse readerships in unexpected contexts, including debates over evolution, colonialism, socialism, gender and sexuality and decadence.

In Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore Wilde’s fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive notes that Wilde took on the brilliant forger who inspired not only Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats but also Victorian artists and authors. Bristow and Mitchell argue that Wilde’s substantial “Chatterton” notebook, which previous scholars have deemed a work of plagiarism, is central to his development as a gifted writer of criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry. This volume, which covers the whole span of Wilde’s career, reveals that his research on Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery, especially in later works such as “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Grounded in painstaking archival research that draws on previously undiscovered sources, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton explains why, in Wilde’s personal canon of great writers (which included such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Chatterton stood as an equal in this most distinguished company.

The most authoritative account of a pivotal event in legal and cultural history: the trials of Oscar Wilde on charges of “gross indecency”  Among the most infamous prosecutions of a literary figure in history, the two trials of Oscar Wilde for committing acts of “gross indecency” occurred at the height of his fame. After being found guilty, Wilde spent two years in prison, emerged bankrupt, and died in a cheap hotel room in Paris a few years after his release. The trials prompted a new intolerance toward homosexuality: habits of male bonding that were previously seen as innocent were now viewed as a threat, and an association grew in the public mind between gay men and the arts.  Oscar Wilde on Trial assembles accounts from a variety of sources, including official and private letters, newspaper accounts, and previously published (but very incomplete) transcripts, to provide the most accurate and authoritative account to date of events that were pivotal in both legal and cultural history.

Theories of sexuality and desire are commonly used in literary and cultural studies. In this illuminating study Joseph Bristow introduces readers to the fundamental critical debates surrounding the topic. This fully updated second edition includes: a historical account of sexuality from the Victorians to the presentdiscussions of the most influential theorists including Freud, Lacan, Bataille, Baudrillard, Cixous, Deleuze, Irigaray and Kristevaa new and extended discussion of queer and transgender theory, race, ethnicity and desirea new preface summarising changes in the field since the first editiona new glossary, annotated further reading section and bibliography.Considering all of the major movements in the field, this new edition is the ideal guide for students of literary and cultural studies.

Theories of sexuality and desire are commonly used in literary and cultural studies. In this illuminating study Joseph Bristow introduces readers to the fundamental critical debates surrounding the topic. This fully updated second edition includes: a historical account of sexuality from the Victorians to the presentdiscussions of the most influential theorists including Freud, Lacan, Bataille, Baudrillard, Cixous, Deleuze, Irigaray and Kristevaa new and extended discussion of queer and transgender theory, race, ethnicity and desirea new preface summarising changes in the field since the first editiona new glossary, annotated further reading section and bibliography.Considering all of the major movements in the field, this new edition is the ideal guide for students of literary and cultural studies.

The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the ‘poetess’, and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.

The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the ‘poetess’, and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.

First published in 1992, Sexual Sameness examines the differing textual strategies male and female writers have developed to celebrate homosexuality. Examining such writers as E.M. Forster, James Baldwin, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Audre Lourde, this wide-ranging book demonstrates how literature has been one of the few cultural spaces in which sexual outsiders have been able to explore forbidden desires.From the humiliating trials of Oscar Wilde to the appalling stigmatisation of people living with AIDS, Sexual Sameness reveals the persistent homophobia that has until recently almost completely inhibited our understanding of lesbian and gay writing. In opening up homosexual literature to informed and objective methods of reading, Sexual Sameness will be of interest to a large lesbian and gay readership, as well as to students of gender studies, literary studies and the social sciences.

First published in 1992, Sexual Sameness examines the differing textual strategies male and female writers have developed to celebrate homosexuality. Examining such writers as E.M. Forster, James Baldwin, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Audre Lourde, this wide-ranging book demonstrates how literature has been one of the few cultural spaces in which sexual outsiders have been able to explore forbidden desires.From the humiliating trials of Oscar Wilde to the appalling stigmatisation of people living with AIDS, Sexual Sameness reveals the persistent homophobia that has until recently almost completely inhibited our understanding of lesbian and gay writing. In opening up homosexual literature to informed and objective methods of reading, Sexual Sameness will be of interest to a large lesbian and gay readership, as well as to students of gender studies, literary studies and the social sciences.

This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially-commissioned chapters offer insights into the works of well-known figures such as Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and the writings of women poets - like Michael Field, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster - whose contribution to Victorian culture has in more recent years been acknowledged by modern scholars. Revealing the breadth of the Victorians' experiments with poetic form, this Companion also discloses the extent to which their writings addressed the prominent intellectual and social questions of the day. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology of the Victorian period and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially-commissioned chapters offer insights into the works of well-known figures such as Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and the writings of women poets - like Michael Field, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster - whose contribution to Victorian culture has in more recent years been acknowledged by modern scholars. Revealing the breadth of the Victorians' experiments with poetic form, this Companion also discloses the extent to which their writings addressed the prominent intellectual and social questions of the day. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology of the Victorian period and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that explains why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siècle poetry, the collection shows how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief.The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W. B. Yeats, who dominated the literary scene of the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson.The Fin-de-Siècle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how women poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer's reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of "gross indecency" it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss's opera Salome and Robert Ross's edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde's name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde's value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer's reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of "gross indecency" it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss's opera Salome and Robert Ross's edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde's name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde's value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.

Inspired by the work of the radical literary scholar, the late Sally Ledger, this volume provides a commentary on the political traditions that underpin the literature of this complex period, and examines the interpretive methods that are needed to understand them.

Drawing on many aspects of contemporary feminist theory, this lively collection of essays assesses Angela Carter's polemical fictions of desire. Carter, renowned for her irreverent wit, was one of the most gifted, subversive, and stylish British writers to emerge in the 1960s.

Part IV offers the first critical edition of the four full length novels and three stories that comprise the Chronicles of Carlingford. Each of the five volumes contains a full scholarly apparatus, including the important variations between the serial versions and the first publication in volume format.

Originally published in 1991. Focusing on ‘boys' own’ literature, this book examines the reasons why such a distinct type of combative masculinity developed during the heyday of the British Empire. This book reveals the motives that produced this obsessive focus on boyhood. In Victorian Britain many kinds of writing, from the popular juvenile weeklies to parliamentary reports, celebrated boys of all classes as the heroes of their day. Fighting fit, morally upright, and proudly patriotic - these adventurous young men were set forth on imperial missions, civilizing a savage world. Such noble heroes included the strapping lads who brought an end to cannibalism on Ballantyne's "Coral Island" who came into their own in the highly respectable "Boys' Own Paper", and who eventually grew up into the men of Haggard's romances, advancing into the Dark Continent. The author here demonstrates why these young heroes have enjoyed a lasting appeal to readers of children's classics by Stevenson, Kipling and Henty, among many others. He shows why the political intent of many of these stories has been obscured by traditional literary criticism, a form of criticism itself moulded by ideals of empire and ‘Englishness’. Throughout, imperial boyhood is related to wide-ranging debates about culture, literacy, realism and romance. This is a book of interest to students of literature, social history and education.

Originally published in 1991. Focusing on ‘boys' own’ literature, this book examines the reasons why such a distinct type of combative masculinity developed during the heyday of the British Empire. This book reveals the motives that produced this obsessive focus on boyhood. In Victorian Britain many kinds of writing, from the popular juvenile weeklies to parliamentary reports, celebrated boys of all classes as the heroes of their day. Fighting fit, morally upright, and proudly patriotic - these adventurous young men were set forth on imperial missions, civilizing a savage world. Such noble heroes included the strapping lads who brought an end to cannibalism on Ballantyne's "Coral Island" who came into their own in the highly respectable "Boys' Own Paper", and who eventually grew up into the men of Haggard's romances, advancing into the Dark Continent. The author here demonstrates why these young heroes have enjoyed a lasting appeal to readers of children's classics by Stevenson, Kipling and Henty, among many others. He shows why the political intent of many of these stories has been obscured by traditional literary criticism, a form of criticism itself moulded by ideals of empire and ‘Englishness’. Throughout, imperial boyhood is related to wide-ranging debates about culture, literacy, realism and romance. This is a book of interest to students of literature, social history and education.

Inspired by the work of the radical literary scholar, the late Sally Ledger, this volume provides a commentary on the political traditions that underpin the literature of this complex period, and examines the interpretive methods that are needed to understand them.

The most significant resource for any researcher wishing to understand the finer details of Oscar Wilde’s remarkable career, the “Oscar Wilde and His Circle” archive at the University of California, Los Angeles houses the world’s largest collection of materials relating to the life and work of the gifted Irish writer. Wilde Discoveries brings together thirteen studies based on research done in this archive that span the course of Wilde’s work and shed light on previously neglected aspects of Wilde’s lively and varied professional and personal life.This volume offers fresh approaches to well-known works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray while paying serious attention to his lesser known writings and activities, including his earliest attempts at emulating the English Romantics, his editing of Woman’s World, and his fascination with anarchism. A detailed introduction by the volume editor ties the essays together and illustrates the distinctive evolution of research on this great writer’s extraordinary career.

Opening with an introduction by Joseph Bristow and featuring thirteen original essays that examine Wilde's achievements as an aesthete, critic, dramatist, novelist, and poet, this provocative and ground-breaking volume ushers the field of Oscar Wilde studies into the twenty-first century. The contributors focus on three neglected areas of Wilde criticism - textual editing, the production and dissemination of Wilde's dramas, and the situating of Wilde's writings in cultural, political and social contexts - and cast fresh light on topics that include Wilde's early dramatic criticism, his engagement with socialist thought, his groundbreaking editorship of The Woman's World, and the relation of his plays to late-Victorian feminism and homosexual blackmail.WildeWritings brings together research by established and emergent scholars, some of whom draw on unpublished archival material, and all of whom have something fresh to say about Wilde. The collection provides new interventions into urgent critical debates about Wilde and effeminacy, masochism, and Christian theology, and draws attention to significant problems in the textual edition of Wilde's divergent canon of writing, his debt to the 'aesthetic' fiction of the popular novelist Ouida, and the transmission of his drama in twentieth-century China. Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

The fin de siècle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn towards modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century.This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp’s radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D’Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, The Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women’s writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siècle.

Part IV offers the first critical edition of the four full length novels and three stories that comprise the Chronicles of Carlingford. Each of the five volumes contains a full scholarly apparatus, including the important variations between the serial versions and the first publication in volume format.