For Further Reading
BIOGRAPHIES
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. 1987. New York: Vintage, 1988. The now-standard Wilde biography, even though many critics have had cause to find fault with it, in both its reporting of the facts and its assumptions. Written by the redoubtable twentieth-century biography-based scholar of Anglo-Irish literature, known also for his biographies of Yeats and Joyce.
Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. New York: Covici, Friede, 1930. Written by a friend of Wilde. Includes reminiscences by George Bernard Shaw and Lord Alfred Douglas.
Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. London: William Hodge, 1948. Revised 1962 (paperback edition: New York: Dover Publications, 1975) and 1973. Trial commentary from contemporary newspaper reports and trial proceedings.
Pearce, Joseph. The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. London: Harper-Collins, 2000. Takes Wilde’s Catholicism more seriously than Ellmann does; very detailed and informative on this subject.
Sherard, Robert. The Life of Oscar Wilde. London: T. W. Laurie, 1906. Wilde’s first biography, written by a friend and contemporary.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Mason, Stuart (pseudonym of Christopher Millard). Bibliography of Oscar Wilde. 1914. London: Bertram Rota, 1967. First Wilde bibliography, by a close friend of Robert Ross; provides details on editions of Wilde’s work and includes information on reviews, parodies, manuscript sales, etc.
Mikhail, E. H. Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. The most comprehensive bibliography when it was published; includes discography.
Mikolyzk, Thomas A. Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport. CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Includes chronology through Wilde’s 1909 reinterment, Wilde’s books and periodical publications, books partially or entirely on Wilde, and articles and dissertations.
Small, Ian. Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1993. Provides editorial recommendations and outlines recent critical discussions and changes in approach to Wilde studies.
———. Oscar Wilde: Recent Research. A Supplement to Oscar Wilde Revalued. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2000. The most up-to-date assessment of Wilde criticism and its new paradigms; extremely helpful.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON THE 1890s
Beckson, Karl. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Covers everything from anarchism, socialism, and feminism to prostitution, Decadence, and scientific advances; considers the relationships to literature of Wilde’s milieu.
———, ed. Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890’s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose. Chicago: Academy Chicago, revised 1992. Very useful, representative anthology of poetry; short prose, both fiction and nonfiction; and some drama; includes, for example, Wilde’s Salome and some poems and translations by John Gray.
Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen Nineties. 1913. New York: Capricorn, 1966. Account written by one who was there; subject to selective memory and point of view; includes a chapter on Wilde.
Lambourne, Lionel. The Aesthetic Movement. London: Phaidon, 1996. A very helpful coffee-table art book and cultural history with beautiful color illustrations exemplifying representative Aesthetic art and architecture.
McCormack, Jerusha Hull. The Man Who Was Dorian Gray. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. By John Gray’s only objective biographer.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. 1892. English translation, 1895. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Quintessential contemporary anti-Aesthetic/Decadent rant; hyperactive, surprisingly entertaining. The author makes Wilde a target for his aestheticism, his eccentricities, and his admiration of immorality.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Originally published as Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Oxford World Classics. Edited, with a new introduction, by Adam Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. The volume that established Pater as a leading proponent of the idea that life should be driven by an appreciation of beauty and profound ideas. While some contemporaries found the book morbid and lacking in scholarship, it strongly influenced undergraduates of the day; Wilde called it “the holy writ of beauty.”
WILDEANA
Beckson, Karl. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Indispensable collection of reviews.
———. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS Press, 1998. Extremely useful alphabetical listing of people, places, topics, and events germane to Wilde studies.
Hyde, H. Montgomery, ed. The Annotated Oscar Wilde. London: Orris, 1982. Complete Wilde texts with liberal annotations and useful, entertaining illustrations.
Mikhail, E. H., ed. Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1979. Firsthand accounts of Wilde from both people who knew him well and those with more limited contact.
Wilde, Oscar. Complete Letters. Edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Huge, well-annotated one-volume edition.
CRITICISM
Coakley, Davis. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish. Dublin: Town House, 1994. Focus on Wilde’s Irishness.
Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1993. Seminal text on this subject.
Knox, Melissa. Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Psychoanalytic biocriti cism; sometimes considered controversial for its approach and focus on Wilde’s alleged syphilis infection.
Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Excellent study of Wilde’s and the 1890’s homosexual context, delineating the contemporary linkage of effeminacy for the first time with homosexuality.
SELECTED TOPICAL BOOKS FEATURING GOOD CHAPTERS ON WILDE
Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, 1997. Important, very entertaining study of the topic in the works of Wilde, Richard Wagner, Walter Pater, J. K. Huysmans.
Mahaffey, Vicki. States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A theoretical approach to Wilde’s Irishness.
