Full Description
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the volume includes never-before translated early reviews of the novel in the European press along with an unpublished parody of Wilde's novel in the form of an "examination paper" by the English writer Max Beerbohm.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.
Contents
Introduction: The Haunting of Dorian Gray The Precedents, Sources, and Literary Contexts of Dorian Gray 1: The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Aesthetic Tradition: Faithful Allusion, Perilous Misquotation 2: The Picture That Failed, or the Light of Dorian Gray 3: "What Never Dies": The Picture of Dorian Gray and Its Afterlife in French Literature and Art The Visual Imagination of The Picture of Dorian Gray 4: Picturing Dorian: Temporality, Abstraction, and Modernity in The Picture of Dorian Gray 5: Illustrating Dorian Gray: The Contingent Ephemerality of Beauty Dorian Gray's Philosophical, Cultural, and Erotic Entanglements 6: The Vitality of Dorian Gray: Darwinism, Philosophy, Life 7: "A Form of Reverie, a Malady of Dreaming": Dorian Gray, Personality, and Mass Culture 8: Dorian Gray's Generic Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Queer Form The Formal Vicissitudes of a Decadent Novel 9: Exquisite Fantasy: Language and Anti-Mimesis in The Picture of Dorian Gray 10: Fin-de-Siècle Feelings: Melodrama and the Aesthetics and Ethics of Emotion in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray 11: The Most Decadent Chapter: Ornamentation, Influence, and the Challenge to Realism in The Picture of Dorian Gray Dorian Gray's Afterlife in Fiction, Film, Theater, Dance, and Performance 12: The Vienna "Dorian Gray Epidemic" of 1907: Theatrical Distortion, Critical Dissent, and the First Stagings of Wilde's Novel 13: Red Herrings and Yellow Birds: The 1945 Hollywood Film The Picture of Dorian Gray 14: Dorian Gray Forever: Decadence, Glamor, and the Vicissitudes of Pop Culture Adaptation
