Richard A. Kaye – författare

This collection of new essays devoted to Oscar Wilde's classic novel presents new critical work by prominent scholars that deal with numerous aspects of the famed novel. Essays range from early literary influences on the novel and its controversial early reception to its afterlife in literature, film, dance, photography, theatre, and television. In addition to considering Dorian Gray as an iconic queer work of fiction that daringly challenged late-Victorian literary practices, the volume explores Wilde's novel in terms of the history of the European novel and the book's innovations as a gothic, supernatural work that defied the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. Along with striking illustrations of the novel since its publication --including images from popular adaptations-- the volume includes never-before translated early reviews of the novel in the European press along with an unpublished parody of Wilde's novel in the form of an "examination paper" by the English writer Max Beerbohm. Edited by Richard Kaye, this volume offers multiple and fascinating perspectives on Oscar Wilde's classic in fourteen highly readable essays.

This collection of new essays devoted to Oscar Wilde's classic novel presents new critical work by prominent scholars that deal with numerous aspects of the famed novel. Essays range from early literary influences on the novel and its controversial early reception to its afterlife in literature, film, dance, photography, theatre, and television. In addition to considering Dorian Gray as an iconic queer work of fiction that daringly challenged late-Victorian literary practices, the volume explores Wilde's novel in terms of the history of the European novel and the book's innovations as a gothic, supernatural work that defied the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. Along with striking illustrations of the novel since its publication --including images from popular adaptations-- the volume includes never-before translated early reviews of the novel in the European press along with an unpublished parody of Wilde's novel in the form of an "examination paper" by the English writer Max Beerbohm. Edited by Richard Kaye, this volume offers multiple and fascinating perspectives on Oscar Wilde's classic in fourteen highly readable essays.

In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and W.M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-doubles. In the writing of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, flirting harbours potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In works by D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Foster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations. In this study, Richard Kaye makes a case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the 19th century and early 20th century novel. The author examines flirtation in major English, French and American texts to demonstrate how the changing aesthetic of such fiction fastened on flirtatious desire as a paramount subject for distinctly novelistic inquiry. The novel, he argues, accentuated questions of ambiguity on which an erotics of deliberate imprecision thrived.