Abstract
Oscar Wilde has variously been given credit for inventing postmodernity, celebrity culture (including, of course, the celebrity scandal and subsequent trial), queer theory, fashion journalism, and camp. Strangely, the claims only get grander from here. Wilde himself took credit for inventing Aubrey Beardsley, Tom Stoppard recently implied that Wilde invented Love, and in the 18 May 1998 issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik claimed that Wilde “invented the talk show guest before there was a talk show to welcome him.”1
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Karl Beckson, ed. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1970), 206.
Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand, Oscar Wilde’s Notebooks: A Portrait of a Mind in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 127.
A. Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–34.
Peter Burger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 27.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 226.
John Wilcox, “The Beginnings of l’art pour art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2 (1953), 361.
GH. Bell-Villada, Art For Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism 1790–1990 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 1–91.
R.V. Johnson, Aestheticism (London: Methuen, 1969), 10.
Ian Small and Josephine Guy, Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 7–8.
Anne Varty, A Preface to Oscar Wilde (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998), 112–113.
Regenia Gagnier, “Wilde and the Victorians,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31.
Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist and His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 129.
Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 4.
Guy Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde (Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1993).
Ian Small and Josephine M. Guy, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19.
See Neil Sammells, Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde (New York: Longman, 2000).
Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (London: Macmillan, 1977), 22.
Ian Small, “Semiotics and Oscar Wilde’s Accounts of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 25.1 (1985): 50–56.
Alice I. Perry Wood, “Oscar Wilde as a Critic,” North American Review 202 (July-December 1915): 899–909.
Jonathan Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2004 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Coppa, F. (2004). Performance theory and performativity. In: Roden, F.S. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524309_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524309_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-2148-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-52430-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)