Oscar Wilde - Trinty College, Oxford

	The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe
	Trinity College, Oxford 8th-9th March 2008
This conference is sponsored by the English Faculty, Oxford University; For Trinity College, click here For more information from Stefano Evangelista, conference convenor, click here

ABSTRACTS FROM THE SPEAKERS
Bershtein, Evgenii
	‘Next to Christ’: Oscar Wilde in Russian Modernism
	Oscar Wilde was and has remained the most popular representative of early European modernism in Russian culture. This paper will focus on Wilde's biographic legend and argue that it impacted the formation of sexual identities in fin-de-siècle Russia. While his literary work and biography appear to have been as important there as in many Western cultures, Wilde’s Russian reception had a number of distinctive features which I will investigate. First, I will show how the detailed and sensational news reports of Wilde’s scandalous fall preceded his literary fame in Russia. I will argue that the anachronistic way in which the Wilde narrative reached Russia coloured his overall reception there. Second, I will investigate how the Wilde myth, while preserving a sharp memory of his sexual transgression, acquired strong Christological connotations in Russia, and how his reputation of a decadent sufferer translated into religious sainthood. Third, I will consider the role of the Russian Wilde which was assigned to the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, despite the fact that Kuzmin emphatically rejected the scenario of gay martyrdom suggested by the Wilde myth. I will argue, however, that Kuzmin’s very condemnation of this myth confirmed its inescapable relevance as symbolic framework for homosexuality in the Russian culture of the Silver Age. Finally, I will address the question of the ideological roots of Kuzmin's utopian erotic ideology and contrast it to the Wilde myth.

Bizzotto, Elisa
	‘Children of Pleasure’: Oscar Wilde and the D’Annunzio Circle
	My contribution will focus on Oscar Wilde’s influence on the Italian fin de siècle, particularly on the circle gathering around the magnetic, protean personality of Gabriele D’Annunzio and composed by such critics and artists as Angelo Conti, Giuseppe Saverio Gargano, Adolfo de Bosis, Adolfo Orvieto, Ugo Ojetti and Emilio Cecchi. Indeed, D’Annunzio’s indebtedness to, and attraction for Wilde is in more than a sense exemplificative of the intricate process of his early Italian reception. My delving into Wilde’s impact on Italian aesthetic and decadent culture will privilege the sophisticated aesthetic magazines of the period as well as the reviews to the first Italian translations of his works as the main channels of his influence. Diverse, often ambivalent responses to Wilde’s poetics and ethics will emerge, even though fundamentally apologetic intentions are shared by most early Italian contributions on him. Such attitude will prove so vital as to persist well into the twentieth century.
Doody, Noreen
	The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Ireland
	This paper looks at the importance ascribed to Wilde’s nationality in Ireland during his lifetime and the changes in the public perception of his identity in the 20th century. Wilde’s parents were highly respected public figures in Ireland and their son’s activities were of great general interest. Wilde’s aesthetic stance was regarded with vague derision but his scholarly and successful dramatic career was looked on with an amount of national pride. Wilde’s plays enjoyed huge success on the Dublin stage and were seen as works of genius if somewhat immoral. They are commonly judged to be lampooning English society rather than simply funny characters in funny situations. Wilde’s name figures frequently in the national papers. However, when Wilde is brought to trial, the Irish Times reacts with silence. Other publications report the proceedings of the trial with accuracy and a certain sympathy for Wilde. For the next ten years or so no mention of Wilde is to be seen in the major Irish newspapers. Then, in 1907 a revival of Wilde’s plays took place in the Gaiety Theatre and Wilde was reclaimed as a great Irish writer. During his lifetime Wilde’s Irish literary contemporaries often explained him in terms of his national identity and the colonised position of his country. He is unambiguously portrayed as Irish in the newspapers of the 19th and early 20th century. However, in 1954 one hundred years after Wilde’s birth, a controversy arose in the Irish newspapers regarding Wilde’s identity; it was claimed that he was English. Some of the reasons for this were Wilde’s representation in literature and films, his language and location and the complex history and cultural traditions of Ireland. With the advent of post-colonial theory and thorough research of Wilde in his own time Wilde’s national identity was fully restored in the 1990s. Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland and Davis Coakley’s Oscar Wilde: the Importance of Being Irish were crucial works in this regard. The paper concludes with a look at the continued cultural importance of Wilde in Irish life.

Ekdawi, Sarah
	‘I Walked with Other Souls in Pain’: Oscar Wilde’s Imprisonment and Cavafy’s Prison Metaphors
	C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) is considered by many to be the major poet of Modern Greece. A testament to his international reputation is his recent inclusion, in a new translation, in the ‘Oxford World Classics’ series of the Oxford University Press. At the time of Wilde’s imprisonment (1895-7), C.P. Cavafy began work on a sequence of poems entitled, ‘Prisons’. Although never published as a thematic sequence (Cavafy later revised the thematic arrangement of his poems and dropped individual sequence-titles in favour of a broader thematic categorization of his work), the metaphor of ‘prison’, both for socially-imposed curbs on personal behaviour and for artistic self-censorship, pervades his œuvre after this date. Oscar Wilde’s dramatic fall from grace, his persecution for what Cavafy termed ‘a natural tendency’, was to serve as a lifelong warning to Cavafy, to the extent that he deliberately attempted to conceal not only his own homosexuality but also his artistic indebtedness to Wilde (implausibly quoting, for example, non-Wildean sources for early poems, such as ‘Salome’). Several of Cavafy’s poems, however, owe an unmistakeable intellectual and/or thematic debt to Wilde’s poetry and prose. Cavafy’s poem ‘Days of 1896’ (1925) may be read as an oblique reference to the fate of Oscar Wilde at the hands of what Cavafy here calls ‘narrow-minded society’. The significance of the date (1896) is that this was the central year of Wilde’s prison sentence. One reason why Cavafy might have been moved to revisit this subject in the 1920s is that in 1924, he considered bringing a libel suit against an Athenian journalist who was attempting to expose his homosexuality. This paper will explore the ‘Prisons’ sequence and other metaphorical references to prison in Cavafy’s writings, in the context of Cavafy’s preoccupation with both Wilde’s writings and his imprisonment for sexual proclivities that Cavafy shared.

George, Jodi-Anne and Hoyle, Brian
	Wilde’s Cinematic Legacy: Three European Film Versions of Salome
	Despite the large number of film adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s work, the ‘Wilde on film’ phenomenon has not received the level critical attention it deserves. Indeed, cinematic adaptations of Wilde, dating back to shortly after his death, can be invaluable in helping to chart the changing reception and perception of his work over the course of the last century. Amongst his works, Salome, perhaps unsurprisingly, has formed the basis of the most controversial and problematic film adaptations. Indeed, the play has attracted several iconoclastic, if somewhat marginalised, figures of post-war European film, including Werner Schroeter (1971), Carmelo Bene (1972) and Ken Russell (Salome’s Last Dance, 1988). This paper will focus on these three adaptations. It will examine the alterations each make to the text and the cinematic equivalents each found to Wilde’s carefully constructed theatrical milieu. Additionally, the paper will examine which aspects of Salome seem to have attracted these particularly directors. Schroeter, approaches the play with equal measures of celebration and parody, and stresses its homoerotic elements. Bene’s film is perhaps the most provocative; a free-form adaptation complete with psychedelic visuals and surrealist humour which ends with a Christ figure crucifying himself. Lastly, Russell’s film turns to his favourite subjects, the artist and creativity. The conceit of his film adds Wilde himself to the action, watching various prostitutes and libertines perform his banned play in a London brothel. Finally, while each of these film makers is known for their highly distinctive style and their respective adaptations of Salome bear this out, we will demonstrate two key similarities in their work. Firstly, they all shared parallel careers in theatre and opera as well as film and sought to reconcile the aesthetics of these older arts with the cinema. Secondly, each showed a great interest in bridging the gap between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

Giudicelli, Xavier
	*Illustration and Reception: the French illustrated editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray* (1910-2003)**
	Arthur Ransome humorously wrote that The Picture of Dorian Gray was ‘the first French novel written in English’. This text certainly seems to have struck a chord in France, where, according to critic Jean Gattégno, Oscar Wilde has long been mainly regarded as ‘the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray’. This paper aims to examine the link between illustration and reception and, more specifically, to envisage the French reception of Wilde’s only novel through the prism of the various illustrated editions it inspired. No less than nine illustrated versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray were published in France between 1910 and 2003, which is more than in Great Britain (only four) and in the United States (five). The very first illustrated edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in France by Charles Carrington, ‘a slightly disreputable English publisher of pornographic literature in Paris’. These various books constitute a motley collection, ranging from collectors’ items with limited editions (notably in the 1920s) to works aimed at teenagers (for the two most recent editions). I would like to address the question of the popularity of The Picture of Dorian Gray in France and try to account for the important number of illustrated editions of this book as well as their diversity, by looking into the publishing history of these illustrated ‘Pictures of Dorian Gray’ I would also like to raise the question of whether there is a French specificity of the illustration of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Illustrated editions are an indication of how an author and his works were perceived at a given moment in time. This is all the more pertinent for The Picture of Dorian Gray. This novel has often been read as a veiled confession of its author, the supposed immorality of the book being taken to be a reflection of Wilde’s own ‘immoral’ life (which led to his tragic downfall). Illustrating The Picture of Dorian Gray thus amounts to painting a portrait of Oscar Wilde. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray in the novel - a palimpsest recording the passage of time - the illustrated versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray cumulatively provide an image of the reception of this book. The metamorphoses of the book according to its various illustrated versions might be fragments from which to piece together French portraits of Oscar Wilde.

Grubica, Irena
	The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Croatia: An Outline
	The aim of my presentation is to give a diachronical overview of the reception of Oscar Wilde in Croatia, to point out different aspects of its manifestation and some examples of creative influence exerted by his works and his poetics on Croatian canonic writers. My work draws on more than hundred bibliographic units of which mostly theatrical reviews, which testify to the intensity of the reception of Oscar Wilde in Croatia, in particular in the first half of the 19th century and an enduring, though modified, presence of his works in Croatian cultural context. Given the fact that the turn-of – the century Croatian cultural centres were increasingly engaged in international European theatre culture, and Croatian intelligentsia was highly responsive to the flux of ideas and current literary trends, the aim of my work is also to explore the dynamics of cultural exchange with other central European cultures at that time and, in particular, examine the dominant influence in the reception of Wilde extended from Paris, Viennese and Berlin literary and theatrical circles. It also aims at investigating various paradigms of the reception of Oscar Wilde in Croatia contextualizing them within a larger sociohistorical, political and cultural framework and the impact Wilde's works and his poetics had on Croatian theatrical and literary circles, their reverberation in the writing of some eminent Croatian authors featuring traces of possible influence, some of them already acknowledged.

Hibbitt, Richard
	The Artist as Aesthete: The Social Reception of Wilde in France
	The French reception of Wilde is profoundly influenced by the first-hand accounts of those writers, journalists and critics who met him during his various visits to Paris, to the extent that this social reception plays a fundamental role in the reception of his work. This paper will focus on two aspects of Wilde’s social reception in France. The first entails a brief overview of the various responses, which will show how the image of Wilde as predominantly an aesthete rather than a writer was partly created by the press. The second involves André Gide’s personal response to Wilde, referring in particular to his essay ‘Oscar Wilde: In Memoriam (Souvenirs)’ (1903) and to his autobiographical work Si le grain ne meurt (1921/26). Gide argues that Wilde is not a great writer, supporting his assertion by referring to Wilde’s well-known remark that he had put his genius into his life and his talent into his works. By privileging the reception of the man at the expense of the reception of the work, Gide reinforces the notion that Wilde’s main contribution to culture is as a representative of Aestheticism. The paper ends by considering to what extent Wilde’s reception in France is distorted by such interpretations.

Ioffe, Dennis
	The Saint Petersburg ‘neo-decadents’ and the myth of Oscar Wilde.
	The ‘new’ decadent movement, that emerged in Saint Petersburg by the end of the 1980s and flourished in the post-Soviet nineties, is by no means a well-researched phenomenon. In my presentation I will try to contribute to its further scholarly analysis and comprehension with regard to the playful use of the ‘image-text’ aesthetics related to Oscar Wilde as articulated by the movement’s members. The main figure and, one might say, a ‘cultural hero’, a suggestive and joyous protagonist of Saint-Petersburgan art scene, the late Timur Novikov should be mentioned as a key-character in this context. To the right you may see the art-work (located in the State Russian Museum) produced by Novikov, reflecting the immense and, as Russians would say in their way, ‘smysloobrazuiuschii’ (‘sense/or meaning producing’) and apparently unique role secured for Oscar Wilde and, more precisely, for the so-called ‘Wildean decadent myth’ in this experimental milieu. The exotic and carnivalesque ‘art festivals’ known under the title of ‘Saint-Petersburgan decadence: The Dark Nights (Temnye nochi)’, held at that time in the ‘Northern Capital’ of Russia, will also be discussed within the framework of my presentation.

Krämer, Lucia
	Oscar Wilde’s Fictional Lives
	This paper maps out the various phases in the history of fictional life-writing on Wilde since his death. A first phase, stretching until the middle of the century, was initiated by German and French writers, while British writings on Wilde’s life in this time were very often the subject of legal dispute. Only after Lord Alfred Douglas’s death in 1945, and in the wake of a first academic engagement with Wilde’s life and trials in the early 1950s, do we find an increase in the number of British biofictions on Wilde. After a relapse into relative neglect in the 1960s and 1970s, Wilde was re-discovered as a subject of fictional life-writing in the 1980s, when the earlier novels and plays, which had predominantly been written in a realistic mode, were complemented by more experimental texts, often of Irish origin, with strong revisionist and metabiographical tendencies. They reflect salient developments in the practice of biography, as well as the growth of academic interest in Wilde, especially from the perspectives of post-structuralism, gender studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies. Two very early biographical dramas on Wilde, Oskar Wilde: Sein Drama by German writer Carl Sternheim, and Le procès d’Oscar Wilde by French writer Maurice Rostand will be the object of closer scrutiny. Despite salient differences between these works concerning their treatment of Wilde’s life, person and oeuvre, which make them forerunners of two important strands of fictional life-writing on Wilde, they share an anti-British polemic which underlines the conceptualisation of Wilde as a rebel and martyr figure in his early European reception.

Mateo, Marta
	The beginnings of Wilde’s performance history in Spain: Ricardo Baeza’s translations and early theatre productions
	Oscar Wilde’s plays were first introduced in Spain, in the early 20th century, mainly through the translations and theatre productions made by Ricardo Baeza, an influential and prestigious figure in the literary circles of the time, who contributed substantially to the Spanish theatre world both as a translator, a theatre impresario and director, and a theatre critic. Baeza is indeed linked to Wilde in all three aspects: although Salomé was first translated into Spanish by J. Pérez Jorba and B. Rodríguez Serra in 1902, he was the first to render Wilde’s comedies into this language and publish them in the years of the First World War, which enabled theatre companies to incorporate them into their repertoires; his own company, Atenea, founded in 1919, was the first to stage Wilde’s most popular comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, in Spanish in that same year; and Baeza was at the centre of a heated debate held about Wilde and his work with writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala between 1917 and 1919. Baeza was particularly meticulous about the quality of his translations, which he made with performance in mind. All of Wilde’s comedies were repeatedly performed in Baeza’s translation by various theatre companies in the late 1910s and over the 1920s, and with notable success, which is all the more important if one bears in mind that the Spanish theatre world was then said to be living a time of crisis and decadence This paper will study the initial reception of Wilde’s plays in Spain, by analysing the reviews received by those early productions and by looking into Baeza’s target texts, in order to deepen our knowledge of the factors which started the performance history of the Irish playwright’s works in Spain; studying these beginnings will partly explain why, from then on, these plays have constantly featured in the country’s theatre repertoires, meeting with a warm welcome from Spanish audiences which has continued till the present day.

Mayer, Sandra
	When Critics Disagree the Artist Survives Oscar Wilde: An All-Time Favourite of the Viennese Stage in the Twentieth Century
	For a playwright whose society comedies were repeatedly deemed outmoded and essentially unfit for the modern stage by critics, Oscar Wilde’s status as periodically revived all-time favourite of Viennese stages has remained remarkably unchallenged to this day. This fact, highlighted by Ernst ist das Leben, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek’s recent interpretation of Wilde’s 1895 box-office success The Importance of Being Earnest in 2005, calls for an investigation of the specific parameters and unique characteristics of Wilde’s lasting imprint on the Vienna theatrical landscape. Since the Anglo-Irish author and playwright was first introduced to the Viennese audience at the Deutsches Volkstheater on 12 December 1903 with his notoriously risqué Symbolist one-act-tragedy Salomé, to be followed in rapid succession by his four society comedies and the fragmentary one-acter Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy) during the first decade of the twentieth century, Wilde’s plays never seem to have gone out of fashion and have remained favourites with Viennese theatre audiences ever since. The paper aims to provide an overview of the stage reception and performance history of Wilde’s plays against the local backdrop of the Vienna stage, where they have been virtually omnipresent for over a century and where they have generally provoked an essentially mixed and diverse, far from unanimously enthusiastic critical reception. In this context, considerable attention will be paid to Jelinek’s very successful drama and stage version of Earnest, which conspicuously exploits the sexual ambivalence and social criticism contained in Wilde’s play.

Price, Graham
	‘The Dandy’s Holiday’: Wildean Echoes in John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun
	This paper will argue that the world and the characters of John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun were strongly influenced by Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest. Rodney Shewan once described Wilde’s Earnest as: ‘the dandy’s holiday…an idyllic trip to the land of doing what one likes where only reason and external authority are denied entry’. Such a description is perfectly suited to McGahern’s final novel since the sphere of existence that is depicted in the text also seems to be outside the realm of national or religious authority. When representatives of nationalism (such as Jimmy Joe McKiernan) or religion (the local priest) appear in the text, they are either ignored completely or are subjected to merciless mockery. As the character of Jamesie says: ‘I only go to mass to look at the girls’. This paper will suggest that the characters in That They May Face live their lives as a perpetual process of what Wilde called Bunburying. They reside in a sphere that allows them to act out their lives in a very theatrical manner with no pressure on them to conform to a single, static identity. This love of the performative is symbolised by Jamesie’s semi-camp persona and the devotion that his brother Johnny and Patrick Ryan have to performing in the theatre. As a result, when Jamesie and the Shah have to leave their homes by the lake, even for short periods, they do so unwillingly and return enthusiastically. This gives them a strong advantage over Wilde’s Algernon who can only go Bunburying down to the country for short, sporadic intervals. The ultimate contention of this paper is that McGahern used Wilde’s utopian text to write about what Joseph O’Connor called ‘that rarest of Irish subjects: happiness’.

Ramos Gay, Ignacio
	Embodying the Wildean Myth: Luis Antonio de Villena
	Spanish writer Luis Antonio de Villena represents the embodiment of the wildean myth both in his works and in his personal life. Perversity, dandyism, wit, decadence, gayness, subversion and entertainment gather together in his extensive work by means of combining a twofold perspective. On the one hand, De Villena is one of the most renowned specialists in Spain in Oscar Wilde and in the British fin de siècle. He is the author of numerous monographies (Wilde total, 2001, Diccionario esencial de fin de siglo, 2001, Máscaras y formas de fin de siglo, 1988, Los andróginos del lenguaje, 1987, Corsarios de guante amarillo, 1983), biographies (Oscar Wilde, 1999), editions (Cartas a Lord Alfred Douglas, 1987) and fiction on Wilde (El charlatan crepuscular: Oscar y Bosie, 1997; La nave de los muchachos griegos, 2003), and has provided Spanish readers with a vision of the Irish playwright updated with the most recent critical theories, ranging from postcolonial criticism to gender studies. On the other hand, he is the author of a number of poems and fiction in which the presence of Wilde’s work and biography is overwhelming (El bello tenebroso, 2004; Hymnica, 1979, Sublime solarium, 1971). Moreover, De Villena’s life may be regarded as a mirror of Wilde, as it can be deduced from numerous statements reproducing Wilde’s epigrams and paradoxes. The aim of this paper is to explore the influence of Oscar Wilde’s writings on Luis Antonio De Villena’s academic and literary works, so as to assert that De Villena’s career constitutes the mimetic illusion of the Wildean icon in the Spanish literary scene.

Reid, Victoria
	‘André Gide’s Homage to Oscar Wilde of 1902, or the Tale of Judas’
	André Gide’s homage to Wilde of 1902 is queer. First there is the delay between Wilde’s death and the time of publication. Second there is the total absence of explicit reference to either Wilde’s or Gide’s homosexuality. Third, it talks as much about Gide as it does about Wilde, and expresses Gide’s anger at Wilde for never returning to writing after The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Fourth, and critically to my argument, it suggests a relationship between Gide and Wilde modelled on the relationship from the Gospels of Judas and Jesus. This is presented in the text covertly and through displacement. Gide, the disciple, like Judas, betrays Wilde, the Jesus-like martyr to homosexuality. Gide relates how when they met in Paris in November 1891 Wilde related to him exclusively the tale of ‘The Disciple’. The closing image of the homage features Gide sitting on a café terrace with his back to the street, so as not to be seen drinking a cocktail with the fallen Wilde. According to Gide’s account of his visit to Wilde in Berneval after the latter’s release from prison, Wilde explained to Gide his project of writing a drama on Pharaoh and a Tale of Judas. Wilde never completed these pieces of work; the final scene of betrayal in Gide’s homage may be read as Gide taking up the pen where Wilde left off. More broadly, Gide’s coming out texts of the 1920s may be read through the same optic.

Rutherford, Annabel
	Seducing the Audience Confounding the Censor: Oscar Wilde’s Influence on the Creation of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes
	During the early years of the twentieth century, Oscar Wilde was, arguably, the most notorious homosexual in Europe, while Serge Diaghilev was the most celebrated. Moreover, while the popularity of Wilde’s plays declined, people waited in line at box offices in hope of obtaining that elusive returned ticket for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Rarely has a theatre art made such an impact on society as the Ballets Russes (1909-1929). During its early years, Diaghilev took the company to the forefront of avant-garde theatre – something never before or since achieved through ballet. But why would a man who had won acclaim for mounting magnificent art exhibitions and demonstrated such strong passion for opera dedicate the rest of his life to ballet? Any attempt to answer such a question requires an exploration of the events in Diaghilev’s life from his years in St Petersburg during the 1890s until the early seasons of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1913. In such a study, one name recurs: Oscar Wilde – in person, in work, and in spirit. In 1898, Diaghilev met Wilde in Paris. We will never know exactly what the two men discussed, but, clearly, something about Wilde strongly interested the young Russian. Diaghilev’s knowledge of Wilde’s works is apparent in his journal the ‘World of Art,’ for which he was editor from 1898-1902. These writings, events in Diaghilev’s life, and a textual analysis of some early ballets suggest that Wilde had a stronger influence on the creation of the Ballets Russes than has previously been noticed. This paper explores this influence and demonstrates how that subtextual ‘invisible dance’ that was silenced for Wilde danced across European stages for Diaghilev.

Vernadakis, Emmanuel
	Oscar Wilde on the Greek Stage
	Oscar Wilde’s classical scholarship as well as his lifelong passion for classical Greek language and culture account for the early translation of his works in Greek and the early productions of almost all his plays on national, private and amateur stages throughout the country. However, during the first decades of the 20th century, Wilde was connected not as much with the classical Greek heritage as with the struggle of the Greeks for making official Demotic, the common language of the people. Since the foundation of the Greek state in 1830, the ‘language question’ had been a critical issue which reflected a conflict between the liberals who championed Demotic and the conservatives who considered it a peasant dialect and defended the purified Katharevousa, a construct halfway between ancient Greek and Demotic. Wilde’s first Greek translations were undertaken by devoted Demotic champions. Salomé, translated by Nicolas Poriotis in 1907, became a reference in terms of poetic excellence of Demotic. Between 1900-1910, a group of poets referred to by the press as ‘the wildeans’ promoted the ‘art for art’s sake’ principle writing poetry in a florid demotic idiom. They met at ‘Byron’ a literary café in the centre of Athens and published their own literary journal called The Anemone. The ‘National poet’ Constantine Palamas, a fervent advocate of Demotic, was one of the main contributors to the journal as was his son, Leandros, who translated The Picture of Dorian Gray into an elaborate Demotic idiom. During the period 1910-1920, Wilde’s works were a vehicle for the promotion of Demotic. His influence increased with the catching on of the Demotic idiom, so much so that the press speaks of a Wilde ‘phenomenon’. In the present paper I propose to examine the reception of Wilde’s first translations and dramatic productions in Greece. The research will be based on criticism published in contemporary papers and magazines

This conference is sponsored by the English Faculty, Oxford University; For Trinity College, click here
For more information from Stefano Evangelista, conference convenor, click here