scholarly journals From Reading to Rio: Oscar Wilde in Brazil

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Ross G. Forman

This essay examines the reverberations of the Oscar Wilde trials in Brazil, using it to probe how a “widening” of Victorian studies might work and arguing that looking beyond the use nodes of comparison enriches our understanding of the long nineteenth century.

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.


Author(s):  
Eva Thienpont

Although in recent years scholars have developed a distinct interest inthe gender perceptions of Oscar Wilde, very little attention has beendevoted to the way in which the author depicts masculinities, particularlyin his comedies. This essay explores Wilde's treatment of the figuresof the Dandy and the Gentleman, the Jatter of which has beenlargely ignored in Wilde studies. It shows that, throughout his comedies,Wilde subverts the traditional images of Victorian masculinity normallyendorsed by nineteenth-century melodrama.


Author(s):  
Alice Jenkins

As some of the key arguments of literature and science studies have become widely accepted and adopted by Victorian studies at large, it is necessary to reconsider a number of methodological issues underpinning the historicist study of literature and science in this period. This essay discusses some of the methodological challenges which face the field in a changing research landscape. The essay asks what, if anything, distinguishes nineteenth-century literature and science studies from other existing and potential interdisciplinary historicist approaches. It outlines and critiques some of the key models used in this field, especially the ‘one culture’ and ‘two-way traffic’ models, and explores two fundamental problems in the explanatory procedures of literature and science studies: problems of analogy and causation.


2018 ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Sukanya Banerjee

By reading a mid–nineteenth-century Bengali play about indigo cultivation, Neel Darpan, this essay argues for the salience of drama—an overlooked form in Victorian studies—to ecocritical discussions. The essay also considers how the irreducibly ecological nature of colonialism recalibrates our analytical objects and impulses. In bringing ecology together with drama, the essay arrives at an idiom of “groundedness” as a critical imperative for ecologically minded scholarship, not least on empire.


Author(s):  
David Weir

The Introduction first considers the etymological and historical meanings of decadence. Different interpretations of the word “decadence” point to historical decline, social decay, and aesthetic inferiority. Decadence today may be best understood as the aesthetic expression of a conflicted attitude toward modernity, which first arose in nineteenth-century France and is best expressed by the author Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Decadence then “travelled” to London, where Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) became the preeminent decadent writer. Other metropolitan centers that made up part of the urban geography of decadence during the fifty-year period (1880–1930) of decadence’s peak were fin-de-siècle Vienna and Weimar Berlin.


Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Neil McCaw

The rapid extension of what has become known as the Digital Humanities has resulted in an array of online resources for researchers within the subdiscipline of Victorian Studies. But the increasingly acquisitive nature of these digital projects poses the question as to what happens once all the information and material we have related to the Victorians has been archived? This paper is an attempt to anticipate this question with specific reference to future digital resources for the study of ‘Victorian murder culture’, and in particular, the essentially textual nature of the nineteenth-century experience of crime. It will argue that there is potential for new forms of digital-humanities archive that offer a more participatory user experience, one that nurtures a cognitively empathic understanding of the complex intertextuality of Victorian crime culture.


Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:


Author(s):  
Ian Campbell Ross

This chapter surveys the history of Irish crime fiction, a genre whose contemporary popularity tends to obscure its origins in the works of nineteenth-century writers including Gerald Griffin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, and L. T. Meade. The discussion highlights some of the most significant works that lie along the broad spectrum of writing that ‘crime fiction’ occupies and, in so doing, reveals the plurality of ‘Irish’ crime fiction over the course of 180 years. Among the topics covered are the features that distinguish nineteenth-century Irish crime writing from its British counterpart; the emergence of Irish-language crime fiction in the early part of the twentieth century, and the defining features of contemporary Irish crime fiction, which has flourished domestically and internationally since the 1990s.


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