Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde - Softcover

Powell, Kerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521283388 ISBN 13: 9780521283380

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2011

Synopsis

'I love acting - it is so much more real than life,' Oscar Wilde famously wrote. Acting Wilde demonstrates that Wilde's plays, fiction, and critical theory are organised by the idea that all so-called 'reality' is a mode of performance, and that the 'meanings' of life are really the scripted elements of a dramatic spectacle. Wilde's real issue was whether one could become the author of his own script, the creator of the character and role he inhabits. It was a question he struggled to answer from the beginning of his career to the end, whether in his position as the pre-eminent dramatist in English or as the beleaguered defendant on trial for 'gross indecency'. Introducing important evidence from Wilde's career-launching tour of America, the often tortured revisions of his plays, and the recently discovered written record of his first courtroom trial, this book reconstructs Wilde's strategic dramatising of himself.

About this title

Book Description:

Introducing important evidence from the recently discovered written record of Oscar Wilde's first courtroom trial, Acting Wilde explores Wilde's strategic dramatising of himself. The resulting portrait is of an Oscar Wilde who anticipates and even surpasses the insights of contemporary critical theory while laying the foundation for 'modern drama'.

About the Author:

Kerry Powell is Professor and Chair of English at Miami University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0521283388
• ISBN 13: 9780521283380
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216