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An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information
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on Current Research, Publications and Productions
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Concerning
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Oscar Wilde
and His Worlds
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Issue no 44: May
2008
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oscholars@gmail.com
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Wilde by
Ralph Steadman. Steel plate etching
16.50” x 21.50”.
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This can
be ordered for $950.00 from EVERY PICTURE
TELLS A STORY
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EDITORIAL PAGE
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Navigating THE OSCHOLARS
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Since November 2007 we have split this page
into two sections. SECTION I now contains our Editorial, and short
pieces that we hope will interest readers. SECTION II is a Guide or
site-map to what will be found on other pages of THE
OSCHOLARS with explanatory notes and links to those pages
(formerly to be found on the Editorial page). Each section is prefaced
by a Table of Contents with hyper links to the Contents themselves. For
Section I, please read on.
For Section II, please click 
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Clicking  takes you to a Table of Contents;
clicking takes you to the hub page for our website;
clicking takes you to the home page of THE
OSCHOLARS .
The
sunflower navigates to other pages.
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THE OSCHOLARS is composed in Bookman Old
Style, chiefly 10 point. You can adjust the size by using the text size
command in the View menu of your browser.
We do not usually publish e-mail addresses in full but the sign @ will bring up an e-mail form.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS II : GUIDE TO ALL
PAGES
Click
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itself, or GO to reach the pages directly
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And
I? May I Say Nothing?
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Editorial
Team
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Nocturne
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Some Sell and Others
Buy
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Awards
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Ellmann
special supplement
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Publications
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Upstage
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Being
Talking About
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Going
Wilde
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The
Rack and The Press
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Visions
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Bibliographies
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Guidance
for submissions
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Reading
Groups
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Wilde Societies
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Conferences, Lectures
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Library
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Shavings
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Appendices
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Editorial, News & Notes [previous issue]
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Mad,
Scarlet Music
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Society
News
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Scenographies
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Nothing in THE OSCHOLARS © is copyright to the Journal
save its name (although it may be to individual contributors) unless
indicated by ©, and the usual etiquette of attribution will doubtless be
observed. Please feel free to download it, re-format it, print it,
store it electronically whole or in part, copy and paste parts of it, and (of
course) forward it to colleagues.
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As usual, names emboldened in the text are those of subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS, who may be contacted through oscholars@gmail.com. Underlined
text in blue can be clicked for navigation through the
document or to other addresses.
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I.
NEWS FROM THE EDITOR
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1.
Innovations
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In our last issue
we announced that our Editorial team strengthened by three more
appointments. Dr Sondeep Kandola of the University
of Leeds joined us as Associate
Editor with the brief of ensuring that we do not overlook developments in
Gothic studies that cover our period.
She was awarded her doctorate from the University
of London in 2003 and her
research can be characterised as an exploration of the relationship between
literature, criticism and national identity from the eighteenth to the
early-twentieth century. Two monographs emerging from this work will be
published in 2008: an interdisciplinary study on the Gothic for Manchester
University Press (Gothic
Britain, Celtic Ireland: literature, criticism and the politics of Union,
1707 – 1907) and Vernon
Lee for the ‘Writers and their Work’ series. We also announced a new Associate Editor,
the art historian Dr Isa Bickmann,
charged with extending our coverage of fin-de-siècle exhibitions in Germany. Our third new Associate Editor was Elizabeth McCollum. Ms McCollum is a graduate of Marlboro
College, Vermont, with a
degree in Victorian History and Costume Design, which she has continued to
study, with a special interest in the representation of Victorian costume in
contemporary theatre and film. She will provide some deepening of our concern
with, e.g., Æsthetic or Rational Dress, both contributing articles and
reviews and commissioning them from other fashion historians.
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Since then we have been joined
by a number of other Associate Editors, greatly extending the range of our
what we intend doing. Patricia Flanagan Behrendt joins us
as American Theatre Editor. Until her
early retirement she was a Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, specialising in History and Theory. She is
the author of Oscar Wilde :
Eros and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan 1991). Under her guidance we will be expanding not
only our coverage of Wilde and other fin-de-siècle playwrights on the
American stage, but placing this in the context of Wilde and fin-de-siècle
studies in contemporary America. Pat Behrendt takes over this post from Tiffany Perala, who
in future will be putting together a section of THE OSCHOLARS addressed to
and encouraging undergraduate writing on Wilde. In this she will be working in harmony with
Andrew Eastham, who is
investigating the teaching of Wilde and Decadence, and thus developing our
reportage of Wilde on the curriculum into an examination of the pedagogical
issues involved. Andrew was awarded a doctorate from University
of London for a project entitled
‘The Ideal Stages of Aestheticism’, and is currently a visiting lecturer at
Royal Holloway, London and Brunel
University, and has recently
taught at King’s and Goldsmiths Colleges
in London.
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It has long been our wish to
improve our coverage of the visual arts of the fin-de-siècle, and our being
joined by Isa Bickmann reinforced this. We now have a small team of art historians,
as Isa has been joined by Síghle
Bhreathnach-Lynch of the National Gallery in Dublin,
and by Sarah Turner, who is
finishing her doctorate at the Courtauld Institute in London. This has stimulated us into gathering the
visual arts material – chiefly announcements and reviews of exhibitions and
publications – and gathering them into a new page called VISIONS. We hope this will expand with the
appointment of further Associate Editors.
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We have also been joined by Valerie Fehlbaum of
the University of Geneva
and Irena Grubica of the University
of Rijeka. Dr Fehlbaum is editing an anthology of
essays by other members of our team (we will be announcing more about this in
a future issue) and Irena is our Associate
Editor for Illyria, by which apolitical and rather
literary conceit we are designating the western Balkans.
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We also record two losses: Maureen O’Connor and Tina O’Toole found that they were no
longer able to reconcile their work with us and their other commitments. Dr O’Connor has been succeeded by Aoife Leahy, who is
the current President of the National Association of English Studies, the Southern
Ireland affiliate of the European Society for the Study of
English. Dr Leahy’s first Letter from Ireland
will be found below. We have not yet
found a successor for Dr O’Toole, so for the time being our plan for a
section of THE OSCHOLARS addressed to the New Woman, heralded in a previous
issue, is abeyance.
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Work continues on the
reconstruction of the website, with improvements in accessibility and design,
so that it becomes a fully-searchable and easily navigated resource.
This involves less scrolling and more clicking, enabling us decrease the
length of pages. Various pages have been split up, and new ones
created. This is largely the inspiration (and wholly the hard work) of
our webmaster, Steven Halliwell. VISIONS is one result of this; another is
that our first early moves towards studying John Ruskin, a section on this
page called Lilies and Sesame, has blossomed into a fully fledged journal on
our website called THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day, under the
energetic editorship of Anuradha
Chatterjee. A
third manifestation is the folder of webpages devoted to the Oxford
Conference on ‘The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe’,
which took place at Trinity College
on 8th/9th March. These pages will be
kept up and expanded, collaborating on-line with Stefano-Maria Evangelista,
who is editing the book for which the Conference was the advance guard.
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To
see all our team, click  ;
to
see VISIONS, click  ;
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To
see THE EIGHTH LAMP, click  ;
to
see the Oxford pages, click 
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Our special supplement on Teleny,
to be published in Autumn 2008, is on course. This is being guest
edited by Professor John McRae
of the University of Nottingham, whose edition of Teleny was the first
scholarly unexpurgated one published. Readers who would like to submit
an article discussing any aspect of Teleny should contact Professor
McRae @. A further special is planned for 2009, on
Oscar Wilde’s stories for children. Initial expressions of interest in
contributing can be sent to oscholars@gmail.com
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So many chances and change
have thrown our publishing schedules out of joint, with only Rue des Beaux
Arts under Danielle
Guérin’s editorship maintaining its intended
two-monthly appearance on time. This
has been balanced by our publishing new content on our website nearly every
day, and announcing this in weekly reports on our ‘yahoo’ subsidiary. The number of our readers who have joined
this has been growing, and it will be increasingly our medium for making
announcements in the place of mass mailings, which increasingly fall foul of
anti-spam traps either at the sending or receiving end. We do urge readers to sign up to this
group. Our NOTICEBOARD also serves all
our journals. Here we publish short term announcements of lectures, publications,
papers and other items of interest submitted by readers. This does not
replace notice in any of the journals, but is intended to be of value between
issues. The ‘yahoo’ forum and
NOTICEBOARD can be reached via their icons.
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II.
THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY
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From
time to time, we invite readers and others who have published articles on
Wilde in anthologies or journals that are only readily accessible in
university libraries (and not always then) to republish them (amended if
desired) on THE OSCHOLARS website.
We also republish older articles on Wilde from anthologies and festchriften,
made obsolete by the march of scholarship, but which may still have some
value in charting how he was viewed by earlier writers.
Since
September 2007, we have been putting such articles on line at the rate of
one a week, and are very happy with the response that this has been
meeting. These appear in a section
called LIBRARY. Its logo, which can be clicked for access, is
This will
bring you to a Table of Contents, arranged thematically, from which you can
link to each article. There are also links to French language
articles similarly republished in rue des
beaux-arts.
These articles are
copyright to their authors, and thus usual rules for citation and against
further publication apply.
New postings are announced weekly on our discussion
forum
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III.
FREQUENTING THE SOCIETY OF THE AGED
AND
WELL-INFORMED: NEWS, NOTES, QUERIES.
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« Questions are never
indiscreet. Answers sometimes are. »
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1.
Oscar Wilde at Sea
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As reported previously, Irish
Ferries have introduced the most luxurious ferry yet to be in their service,
on their Rosslare – France (Cherbourg
/ Roscoff) run. All oscholars will be delighted that, continuing Irish
Ferries’ tradition of naming ships to celebrate Ireland’s
literary heritage (Jonathan Swift 1999 & Ulysses 2001),
this is named - Oscar Wilde. This name was chosen ‘to
honour Ireland’s
most famous wit & dramatist and the many links he had with France.’
The whole ship is ‘themed’ from the ‘Merrion Lounge’ to ‘The Happy Prince
play area’, sometimes with more imagination than knowledge. We believe
that Wilde would have been particularly amused by the fact that under its
previous owners on the Oslo – Kiel
run, the ship was called the Crown Prince Harald.
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Scheduled sailings began on 30th November 2007 between
Rosslare and Cherbourg, departing
from the Co. Wexford port at 16.00hrs.
Thus, the first sailing took place 107 years to the day since the
Wilde’s death in Paris on 30th November 1900.
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A flyer about the ship has
been produced as a pdf and can be downloaded by clicking the image below.
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2.
Oscar Wilde : the Poetic Legacy
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‘Wilde Tribute Poem - Prison
Number C.33’ is part of a collection called ‘Bramble
Lane’ by the Dublin
poet Patrick Shortall, and considers what life must have been like for Wilde
during his incarceration in Reading Gaol. More about this in Aoife Leahy’s
Letter from Ireland,
below.
Copies of Bramble
Lane can be ordered directly from Pat Shortall
on 087-2393062 (00353-87-2393062 outside Ireland).
The CD was recorded at Panchord Studios and manufactured by Trend Digital
Media.
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3.
Oscar Wilde
and the Kinematograph
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We received news that that
Rupert Everett is now looking for finance for making a film about Wilde’s
last years, hich intention has previously been reported here; but details
about this, and about Al Pacino’s film on (rather than of) Salome continue
difficult to come by.
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Posters
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This section, in which we are
displaying film posters, began in April 2003. After appearing here,
these are posted on their own page, called POSTERWALL, gradually building up
a gallery that will make the images more accessible than by searching the
Internet. This can be found by clicking on the icon
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This
month’s posters were found for us by Danielle Guérin.
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‘Richardson [...] as Sir Edward Carson [...] summed up
by one critic as “the only worthwhile part of an otherwise forgettable film”’
– John Miller: Ralph Richardson – The
Authorised Biography. London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1995 p.179.
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4.
Wilde on the Curriculum
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We are always anxious to
publicise the teaching of Wilde at both second and third level, and
welcome news of Wilde on curricula. Similarly, news of the other subjects
on whom we are publishing (Whistler, Shaw, Ruskin, George Moore and Vernon
Lee) is also welcome. As mentioned
above, Andrew Eastham is
developing a study of the teaching of Wilde, which when published we hope
will be helpful to others who have Wilde on their courses; in tandem Tiffany Perala is
looking at undergraduate response.
Progress will be reported here.
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5.
Work in Progress
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In December 2006 we published
a list of fin-de-siècle doctoral theses being undertaken at Birkbeck
College, University
of London, and a similar list in
December 2007. We should very much like to hear from readers at other
universities with news of similar theses they are supervising or undertaking.
We welcome all news of research being undertaken on any aspect of the fin de
siècle. There is a list of
dissertations on Irish literature held on the Princess Grace Irish Library
website (http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_gazette/disserts/a/)
but it seems to be impossible to gain access.
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Jason Boyd (University
of Toronto) has kindly sent us an
abstract and bibliography of his work on Oscar
Wilde and Victorian Edutainment: Lecture Tours as 19th-Century Itinerant Entertainment,
and we are publishing this in ‘And I? May I Say Nothing’.
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6.
A Wilde Collection
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There is no universal handbook
or vade mecum to the various Wilde Collections, and we have made a start
here. Sometimes where a collection’s contents are published in detail
on-line we will simply give an URL; or we may be able to give more details
ourselves. We will then to be able to bring these together as a new
Appendix.
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At the British Library, the manuscript of The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(Add. MS 81634) is on permanent display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery:
Treasures of the British Library. As everybody knows, the Library also holds
the MS of De Profundis, and has
published a facsimile of this, edited by Merlin Holland. For a better reproduction of the first page
than the one opposite, click here.
The British Library has also
kept on
line the pages it created to support the exhibition ‘Oscar Wilde, A Life
in Six Acts’.
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7. Oscar Wilde’s first tombstone.
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Is there any record of what became of this,
with its inscription ‘Verbis meis addere audeant et super illos stillabat
eloquium meum’ (Job XXIX:32)? There is
a photograph of the tombstone in André Gide: Oscar Wilde, A Study from the French. Translated by Stuart Mason.
Oxford: Holywell Press 1905.
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8.
Cigarettes
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Robert Sherard writes that when
he was living in Wilde’s flat in London
he smoked Parascho cigarettes. Does
anyone have any information on these (the internet offering no help)? The reference is Robert H. Sherard: Oscar Wilde, the Story of an Unhappy
Friendship. London:
Greening & Co. 1905. Popular
edition 1908 p.90.
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IV.
THE CRITIC
AS CRITIC
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Last issue’s review section contained reviews by
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin on Caspar
Wintermans’ biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, Deirdre McMahon on Toni
Bentley’s book on the Salome dancers, Sisters
of Salome, Bart Moore-Gilbert on Roberta Baldi’s study of Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, Laurence Tailarach-Vielmas on Sarah
Wilburn’s Possessed Victorians: Extra
Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings, Marie-Luise
Kohlke on Oscar over coffee as seen by Merlin Holland, Michelle Paull on a recent London production of Salome,
and reviews of exhibitions of Moreau, Millais and Walter Crane by Joni Spigler, Antoine Capet and Malcolm
Hicks.
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These can
be seen by clicking
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Current
reviews are Maria Kasia Greenwood on Leslie Clack’s Oscar Wilde in Paris, Elżbieta
Baraniecka on Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury in Augsburg, María DeGuzmán on
Junot Díaz on Oscar Wao, Elisa
Bizzotto on Michael
Kaylor on Oscar Wilde, Pater and Hopkins, Liberato Santoro-Brienza on Elisa
Bizzotto
on Imaginary Portraits, Laurence
Talairach-Vielmas on Andrew Mangham on Violent Women, Susan Cahill on Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on women’s
bodies, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
on Ann Stiles on neuorology, Michael
Patrick Gillespie on Madeleine Humphreys on Edward Martyn, Chantal
Beauvalot on Georges-Paul Collet on Jacques-Emile Blanche,
Linda
Zatlin
on Rodney Engen on Aubrey Beardsley, D.C. Rose on Alexandra Warwick on Oscar Wilde.
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These can be seen by clicking
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Clicking  will take you to a Table of Contents for all our reviews,
which we are updating. We welcome offers to review from readers.
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V.
Letter from
ireland
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Aoife Leahy, who
has succeeded Maureen O’Connor as
our Ireland
Editor, sends the following:
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Greetings from Ireland
to all of the Oscholars. This is my first report of news and events and I’m
delighted to be in touch with all of you.
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A local poet in Dublin,
Patrick ‘Pat’ Shortall, has produced a CD of his poems entitled ‘Bramble
Lane’. Like many Dubliners, Shortall has a deep
affection for Oscar Wilde and has included his ‘Wilde Tribute Poem – Prison
Number C.33’ on the CD. Each of the twelve poems in ‘Bramble
Lane’ is read out by an appropriate voice
artist. For the Wilde tribute, a poem that examines Wilde’s experiences
during his incarceration in Reading Gaol, Shortall chose the Trinity
College educated Shane O’ Reilly.
O’ Reilly recites the lines in convincingly plummy tones and one can imagine
him playing the part of Wilde on stage. Copies of ‘Bramble
Lane’ can be ordered directly from Pat Shortall
on 087-2393062 (00353-87-2393062 from outside Ireland).
The CD was recorded at Panchord Studios and manufactured by Trend Digital
Media.
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A recreation of ‘The Trials of
Oscar Wilde’ with student actors was held in NUI
Galway on Monday the 4th
of February 2008. The event was organised by the Literary and
Debating Society and was part of Múscailt, the NUI
Galway Spring Arts Festival. Audience members were asked beforehand to attend
in 1890s costumes. The recreation was later honoured at the NUI
Galway Society Awards in April, held at the Galway Bay Hotel. The Literary
and Debating Society won the Múscailt Arts Festival Award for organising both
The Trials of Oscar Wilde and the festival’s barn dance. Although I
thought at first that ‘Barn Dance’ might be the name of an intriguing play,
it was the student dance at the end the festival.
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The renowned Cork
actress Fiona Shaw received an award from the U.S. Ireland Alliance at the
third annual ‘Oscar Wilde: Honouring the Irish in Film’ night. The event was
held before the Academy Awards in Los Angeles,
California, on February 21st.
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Recent events in TCD have
meant that Wilde’s name has been at the forefront of Dublin
cultural life. On the 18th of April, An
Anthology of New Writing from the Oscar Wilde Centre was launched in The
Long Room on TCD. A lecture series entitled ‘Trinity College Dublin’s Oscar
Wilde Centre Celebrates 10 years of Creative Writing with Trinity Readings’
ran throughout April 2008. Speakers included Derek Mahon, Sebastian Barry and
Anne Enright.
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The website for the current International
Dublin Gay Theatre Festival has an amusing drawing of Wilde with a green
carnation in his teeth. The festival runs until the 18th of May. The
programme includes a free Cultural Seminar on the history of gay theatre that
will be chaired by Dr Eibhear Walshe
of UCC, to be held in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin from
12 noon to 3pm on the 11th
of May 2008. Dr Walshe has an ongoing research interest in Wilde.
The festival’s website can be found on http://www.gaytheatre.ie/index.html.
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Dr Tina O’ Toole will give a conference paper in the University
of Limerick on Friday the 27th of
June entitled ‘George Egerton, Oscar Wilde and the Beardsley Woman.’ This
year’s theme for the Annual Conference of the Society of the Study of
Nineteenth Century Ireland (SSNCI) is ‘Visual, material and print culture in
Nineteenth Century Ireland.’ The conference runs from the 26th to the 27th of June 2008 in UL and the
organisers can be contacted on ssnciconference08@gmail.com.
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The new Abbey Theatre
production of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband
will begin its run on Thursday the 14th of August. The production is to be
directed by Neil Bartlett, the author of Who
Was that Man, a book that re-examines the life of Oscar Wilde. Watch this
space for further news.
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On the gloomy side, entering ‘Wilde’
or ‘Wilde quotes’ in an internet search engine is currently likely to take
the unsuspecting web surfer to a disturbing anti-immigration blog that is
apparently being written somewhere in Ireland.
The blog uses Wilde’s ‘The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never
simple’ as a header. The choice of a quote from Wilde seems inappropriate to
say the least given his interest in human rights, a commitment that was only
heightened by his time in Reading Gaol. No doubt the blogger is exploiting
Wilde’s popularity to get hits on the site by using such a well-known quote
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The Storytellers Theatre
Company has been touring Ireland
with a new stage adaptation of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. The play is adapted and directed by Liam Halligan. Like
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray,
the original The Turn of the Screw is
an effective 1890s tale, blending apparently supernatural events with undeniable
psychological horror. This new stage version heightens the tension and sense
of claustrophobia of the novella by having only four actors in the cast. The
play will finish its current run in Bray on May 10th
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Last year I bought a
fascinating artwork in ink and graphite on paper by artist and NCAD graduate
Ciara O’ Hara. O’ Hara’s work self-consciously evokes childhood fairytales. Untitled
II (Wallpaper Drawing), the work I found irresistible, would have been
called a ‘study for a painting’ in the nineteenth century. A small and lovely
bird lies dead at the right of a canvas that is dominated by white space.
Underneath a pencilled caption faintly reads ‘The Home Bird Left’. To the
left of Untitled II, a series of intricate and beautiful pencil
drawings of flowers remind the viewer of the designs of William Morris. (O’
Hara cites Oscar Wilde and William Morris amongst her influences.) The little
bird reminds me of the nature studies of Ruskin but also of Wilde’s story ‘The
Happy Prince’. Like Wilde’s touching story, Untitled II transforms the
‘rubbish’ of the dead bird’s corpse into treasure. O’ Hara can be contacted
at ciara.ohara@gmail.com.
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Aoife Leahy
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VI.
BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS
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Here we now only note Calls
for Papers or articles specifically relating to Wilde or his immediate
circles. The more general list has its own page; to reach it, please
click  . We hope these Calls may
attract Wildëans.
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VII.
OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE
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Cristina Pascual Aransáez sends us the following:
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As you may
know, ARCO is an International Contemporary
Arts Fair which is hosted, between Februrary 13th and 18th, in Madrid's
major exhibition site, Ifema. There are contemporary works of art from 257
participant galleries, 68 of them are Spanish, the rest are from 34
foreign countries. One of the Spanish artist, called Jaume Plensa, has
exposed his sculpture "Entre sueños"
("Between Dreams"), which consists of a huge female head of a
Dominican inmigrant which is 2,35 metres high that is hollow in order to
shine with light that comes from inside. On her face his author has
written the 'permanent punishments' of English prisons which Wilde
denounced in his letter of March 1898 to The
Daily Chronicle: "Hunger" (forehead),
"disease" (right cheek) and "Insomnia" (left
cheek). According to Plensa, Oscar Wilde's words made a great impact on
him when he read them for the first time, because he thinks that they are the
key terms which summarise the punishments of the human body when understood
metaphorically as prison.
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In my view, it is noteworthy
that a contemporary artist finds so much beauty in Wilde's serious
expression of his feelings about the terrible prison conditions of his time
that they serve him as an inspiration to create a work of art which
highlights the punishments of the body as our prison. I think that Wilde
would have like it.
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Here I add three links (the
first one is an article about the sculpture which contains Plensa's
opinion on Wilde's letter, the second one contains an image of this
contemporary work, and the third one is the link to ARCO website).
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http://www.ifema.es/ferias/arco/default_i.html
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http://www.prisa.es/articulo.html?xref=20080214prsprsnot_1&type=Tes&anchor=priprenot
(It contains an image of the sculpture).
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http://www.elpais.com/articulo/semana/Poesia/dimensiones/elpepuculbab/20080209elpbabese_3/Tes
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VIII.
WILDE AS UNPOPULAR CULTURE
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Richard Fallis, in his study
of the ‘Irish Renaissance’, wrote that ‘Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw were
good examples of Irishmen who had to go to England
to develop their talents. Wilde’s
mother had been a well-known Young Ireland poetess, but her son found little
in Ireland or Irish literature which meant anything to him’ (p.6). Nevertheless, Fallis uses as an epigraph to
his Chapter 8 (‘Mirrors up to Ireland’,
Anglo-Irish Fiction, 1900-1923’, Wilde’s comment ‘It is the spectator, and
not life, that art really mirrors’ (p.133).
Beyond briefly noting that Wilde (and Shaw) lacked a mentor as John
O’Leary was to Yeats, these are the only remarks on Wilde that Fallis makes,
and this surely reflects the easy dismissal of Wilde that prevailed in
Ireland before Davis Coakley, Jerusha McCormack, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Jarlath Killeeen and Eibhear Walshe.
Richard Fallis: The Irish Renaissance, an Introduction to
Anglo-Irish Literature. New
York: Syracuse
University Press 1977; Dublin
Gill & Macmillan 1978.
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IX.
OSCAR WILDE: THE VIDEO
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Our video
of the month is Lady Windermere’s Fan, a 1985 television production directed
by Tony Smith.
The cast includes Helena Little as Lady Windermere, Tim
Woodward as Lord Windermere, Stephanie Turner as Mrs. Erlynne, Kenneth
Cranham as Lord Darlington, Sara Kestelman as the Duchess of Berwick and Amanda
Royle as Lady Agatha Carlisle.
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X.
Lilies
and
Sesame / THE EIGHTH LAMP
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In our last issue
we announced under this heading the first, embryonic addressing of Ruskin
studies in our journal, under the guidance of Anuradha Chatterjee
(University of South
Australia).
Since then Dr Chatterjee has produced a splendid first issue
of a Ruskin journal, and issued a Call for
Papers for the second. THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day
will shed much light in new places, and place Ruskin studies firmly in
conjugation with Wilde studies.
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XI.
Web Foot
Notes
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A
look at websites of possible interest. Contributions welcome here as
elsewhere.
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All the material that we have
thus far published in the 'Web Foot Notes' was brought together in June 2003
in one list called 'Trafficking for Strange Webs'. New websites will
continue to be reviewed here, after which they will be filed on the
Trafficking for Strange Webs page. A Table of Contents was added for
ease of access. ‘Trafficking for Strange
Webs’ surveys 48 websites devoted to Oscar Wilde. The Société Oscar Wilde is also
publishing on its website two lists (‘Liens’ and ‘Liaisons’) of
recommendations. To see ‘Liens’, click here. To see ‘Liaisons’, click here.
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To see ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’,
click  . (A major overhaul of this
page is part of our reconstruction plans.)
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·
We
recommend a visit to http://www.dandyism.net/. This represents a serious attempt to get to
grips with dandyism, and we will look at it more closely in future.
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·
www.IrishNewspaperArchives.com. Andrew Martin of the Irish Newspaper
Archive has announced the opening of the ‘largest online database
of Irish Newspapers ever published on the Internet,1763 to the
present. Institutions can
search, retrieve and view Ireland's
past in the exact format as it was published ... the most comprehensive
and complete Irish Newspaper archive in the world. Each word is
retrievable and every paper is date ranged indexed by title, date month and
year. The resource now covers the
majority of Ireland's
counties and continues to grow on a monthly basis.’
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·
Irish
History Online is an authoritative guide (in progress) to what has been
written about Irish history from earliest times to the present. It has been
established in association with the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of
British and Irish History (of which it is now the Irish component) and
London's Past Online.Since the most recent update (February 2008) IHO
contains over 63,000 items, drawn mostly from Writings on Irish History,
and covering publications from 1936 to 2004 (in progress). In addition, it
contains all the Irish material currently held on the online Royal Historical
Society Bibliography. (The latter is less comprehensive but covers a longer
period of publications, up to the most recent). In summer 2008, publications
for 2005 will be made available for online searching. During the current
phase of funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and
Social Sciences (2006-9), particular attention is being paid to enhancing
coverage of the Irish abroad: at the most recent update almost 500 new
records on the Irish abroad were added, including many references collected
in libraries in the U.S.A.
and Canada.
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XII.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
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We
have recently been adding new bibliographies at the rate of about once a
week. Clicking on the icon below will
lead to the Bibliographies Table of Contents, with links to each one.
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XIII.
NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR
WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS
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Readers
accustomed to checking here for news of the Wilde Societies are advised that
these now have their own page. To reach it, please click
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XIV.
Acknowledgements
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THE
OSCHOLARS new website continues to be provided and constructed by Steven
Halliwell of The Rivendale Press,
a publishing house with a special interest in the fin-de-siècle. Mr
Halliwell joins Dr John Phelps of Goldsmiths
College, University
of London, and Mr Patrick
O’Sullivan of the Irish Diaspora Net as one of the godfathers without
whom THE OSCHOLARS could not have
appeared on the web in any useful form.
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Return
to Table of Contents | Return to hub page | Return to THE OSCHOLARS home page
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