Oscar Wilde’s Misattributions: A Legacy of Gross Indecency

Drawing on correspondence and periodical advertising as well as paratextual and bibliographic detail, this paper compares editions of the three most prominent texts falsely associated with Oscar Wilde: The Green Carnation (1894), an intimate satire on Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas actually written by Douglas’ friend Robert Smythe Hichens; “The Priest and the Acolyte” (1894), a paedophilic story written by John Francis Bloxam and presented as evidence against Wilde during his libel trial and then privately reprinted; and the erotic novel Teleny (1893), which is still attributed to Wilde today. His name appeared in tandem with these novels over the course of a century, linking him further with sex and scandal. Two separate editions of Teleny in 1984 and 1986 feature introductions by Winston Leyland and John McRae, respectively justifying Wilde’s authorship and describing the work as likely a round-robin pornographic collaboration between Wilde and his young friends. By recognising and exposing these cases of literary impersonation, we can amend Wilde’s legacy.

The Double-Tongued Author: Re-reading Sophocles, Thomas Hardy, and Eduard Vilde

The article discusses the authors’ ambivalent attitude towards their protagonists, drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Eduard Vilde’s Mäeküla piimamees (Milkman of the Manor). Firstly, the hypothesis based on Aristotle’s Poetics and the idea of Pericles having been a possible prototype of Oedipus is proposed, according to which Sophocles could have been critical of the tyrant of Thebes as a noble representative of a polis at war with Athens, justifying his pains in addition to showing compassion. Such an interpretation is in contrast with the humanist and protest-driven glorification initiated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Another example of the author’s “hypocrisy” is Thomas Hardy’s novel that is generally, and with reason, read as critical of Victorian society. However, the work’s reception has failed to address the motif of mystical revenge on the inheritor of the bloodline of foreign conquerors that occurs in the shadow of a woman’s tragedy and is executed with consistency, yet is not seen as the text’s rival dominant. Still, without considering the opposing line of interpretation that constitutes a parallel in its tragic irony, the understanding of the novel will remain superficial. The third example of the author’s split viewpoint can be found in the first Estonian novel to excel in artistic maturity that also stands out as the first psychological and erotic novel. Vilde’s social-critical programme in the name of the oppressed country people and women’s emancipation clashes in an intriguing way with his erotomanic objectifying gaze on the woman which rather represents a patriarchal attitude bent on subordinating the other sex. Vilde’s ambivalence towards his wayward heroine makes her a most interesting character whose mystery cannot be solved unequivocally.

‘Carving the Complete Edition’: Self-commentary, Poetry, and Illustration in the Early-Qing Erotic Novel Romance of an Embroidered Screen (1670)

Scholars of late imperial Chinese fiction have demonstrated that Ming ‘literati novels’ possessed both intellectual sophistication and aesthetic seriousness. Nonetheless, the large corpus of mid-length fictional narratives of the Qing remains mired in problematic assumptions about its ostensibly popular nature. The self-commentaried edition ofEmbroidered screen(Xiuping yuan) presents a salient example for reassessing the nature of Qing novels and the reading of fiction in the seventeenth century. First circulated in manuscript copies, extensive auto-commentary was added when the novel was committed to print. The commented edition incorporates different genres—poetry, examination essay, and anecdotal accounts—as well as visual elements, all intended to appeal to elite literati tastes among Qing readers. Its literary, visual, and formal heteroglossia also contributed to its popularity in eighteenth-century Japan, which in turn secured its preservation and eventual modern rediscovery, even while it fell into obscurity in Qing China, most likely due to political censorship.

Imagining O encountering India: Recounting an embodied experience

In February 2012, Richard Schechner’s performance-installation Imagining O travelled from its original place of creation in Canterbury (UK) to the International Theatre Festival of Kerala in Thrissur (India). Imagining O is an immersive and participatory experience that brings together voices of Shakespeare’s women and Pauline Reage’s classic French erotic novel The Story of O. This performance report explores the encounter of a primarily European company with the bodies/gazes of an Indian audience, and their role as spectators in shaping the living organism of the performance. Taking a dialogic structure, it exists in the space between two authors’ voices and experiences — Roanna Mitchell as movement director, Dr Pablo Pakula as performer – mirroring the production’s decentred nature and its refusal of an objective standpoint.