Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions

Opening with an introduction by Joseph Bristow, this volume features 13 essays examining Oscar Wilde's achievements as an aesthete, critic, dramatist, novelist and poet.

The contributors focus on three neglected areas of Wilde criticism - textual editing, the production and dissemination of Wilde's dramas, and the situating of Wilde's writings in cultural, political and social contexts - and cast light on topics such as Wilde's early dramatic criticism, his engagement with socialist thought, his editorship of "The Woman's World", and the relation of his plays to late-Victorian feminism and homosexual blackmail.;The volume brings together research by established and emergent scholars, some of whom draw on unpublished archival material.

It offers interventions into urgent critical debates about Wilde and effeminacy, masochism, and Christian theology, and draws attention to significant problems in the textual edition of Wilde's divergent canon of writing, his debt to the "aesthetic" fiction of the popular novelist Ouida, and the transmission of his drama in 20th-century China.