Kate Hext - Böcker

'It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.'The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) proclaims that it is 'A Trivial Play for Serious People'. In fact, collected here alongside Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Salome (1891, 1894), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1895), Earnest shows that the questions raised by Wilde's plays are anything but trivial. Witty and radical, they elegantly challenge Victorian social proprieties, featuring lies, blackmail, illicit desires, seductions, and double lives. This volume, edited by Kate Hext, positions Wilde's major plays in the context of Wilde's life, career, and late-Victorian culture. Its introduction provides a readable overview with stylistic analyses to help readers understand the plays and why they are still fresh and relevant today, followed by sections on each play which explain key figures, plot devices, and Wilde's evolution as a dramatist.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 Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde puts Wilde the Icon into an expansive literary and dramatic context. It offers a readable guide to Wilde studies for the early twenty-first century. Its chapters reflect Wilde's status as a queer writer while filling in the gaps that this focus have left and looking forward to the next generation of critical studies on Wilde. It is designed to appeal to students and those with a general interest in Wilde, as well as professional academics. Its comprehensive discussions of his writings show how these interact with, and transfigure, both their age and his life, while providing readers with clear and extensive suggestions on approaches to reading, thinking, and writing about them. It is organized in four sections: Places, Works, Intellectual Contexts, and Reception. The first section on Places tells the story of Wilde's life and intellectual evolution through the places that defined its contours: Dublin, Oxford, London, America, France, and Italy. The second section on Wilde's Works provides new and in-depth directions to close reading Wilde's writing, with generative ideas on the development, style, structure, and significance of each of his major works. The section on Intellectual Contexts brings together chapters on the main ideas and cultures of thought that shaped Wilde's thinking, from late-nineteenth century sexuality and fashion to the ancient world and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The final section on Reception focuses on the central categories in which Wilde's works and life have been read and influenced cultural movements since his death. Wilde's afterlife has been vibrant and chapters in this section include discussions of how he influenced camp and pop, alongside the contentious textual history of his works.

Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. This is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema become the movies, it reveals how Wilde helped to shape Hollywood in the early twentieth century. It begins with his 1882 American tour, and traces the ongoing popularity of his plays and novel in the early twentieth century, after his ignominious death. Following the early filmmakers, writers and actors as they headed West in the Hollywood boom, it uncovers how and why they took Wilde's spirit with them. There, in Hollywood, in the early days of silent cinema, Wilde's works were adapted. They were also beginning to define a new kind of style -- a 'Wilde-ish spirit', as Ernst Lubitsch called it -- filtering into the imaginations of Lubitsch himself, as well as Alla Nazimova, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein and many others. These were the people who translated Wilde's queer playfulness into the creation of screwball comedies, gangster movies, B-movie horrors, and films noir. There, Wilde and his style embodied a spirit of rebellion and naughtiness, providing a blue-print for the charismatic cinematic criminal and screwball talk onscreen.Discussing films including Bringing Up Baby, Underworld, and Laura, alongside definitive adaptations of Wilde's works, including, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, and Salome, Wilde in the Dream Factory revises how we understand both Wilde's afterlife and cinema's beginnings.

Explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. It also considers the dynamics between form and thought at the fin de siècle, contextualizing its comments in terms of Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and others, to offer a fully integrated account of the intellectual cultures and currents in this period. Key Features:Boldly reassesses Pater's intellectual significance, arguing that he self-consciously poised on the cusp between late-Victorian Romanticism and ModernismImaginatively combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'Provides the most substantial scholarly engagement with Pater's unpublished manuscripts (held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

This is the first and only comprehensive introductory study of Walter Pater, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and philosopher. One of the late nineteenth century's most important and least understood writers, Pater evinced a new mode of hedonism that presented a fundamental challenge to the prevailing moral and social norms of his contemporaries, responding to post-Darwinian sensibility, waning faith, and new philosophies in ethics and epistemology. In his diverse and daring writings, Pater spoke for a generation that encompassed aestheticism, decadence and the emergence of a queer literary canon, including writers such as Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field. His defining influence continued to be felt long after his rise to fame and notoriety by such major writers such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Featuring exceptional detail and thematic breadth of coverage, this Companion accessibly introduces Pater's main works and demonstrates his ongoing significance.

This is the first and only comprehensive introductory study of Walter Pater, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and philosopher. One of the late nineteenth century's most important and least understood writers, Pater evinced a new mode of hedonism that presented a fundamental challenge to the prevailing moral and social norms of his contemporaries, responding to post-Darwinian sensibility, waning faith, and new philosophies in ethics and epistemology. In his diverse and daring writings, Pater spoke for a generation that encompassed aestheticism, decadence and the emergence of a queer literary canon, including writers such as Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field. His defining influence continued to be felt long after his rise to fame and notoriety by such major writers such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Featuring exceptional detail and thematic breadth of coverage, this Companion accessibly introduces Pater's main works and demonstrates his ongoing significance.