THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY


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This page contains information that complements the articles published in Portable Document Format.


Felski, Rita

Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor and Director of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, specialising in Feminist Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity, Aesthetics, and Cultural Studies . Her article 'The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch', which we republish here by kind permission, first appeared in PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 5. (Oct., 1991), pp. 1094-1105

Link to homepage: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/faculty/felski_rita.shtml


Gillespie, Michael Patrick

Michael Patrick Gillespie is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University. He has written several books on the works of Oscar Wilde and is the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. In addition, he has published books on chaos theory and literature and on the works of James Joyce and William Kennedy. His book on Irish film will be published in 2008. We are very happy to republish five articles by Professor Gillespie, at the rate of one a month, beginning in January 2008. The articles republished here by kind permission are:

Link to homepage: http://www.marquette.edu/english/faculty/gillespie-michael.shtml

Professor Gillespie has kindly provided this introductory note:

Nothing Succeeds Like Excess: The Joys of Rereading

Gratitude proved to be the dominant feeling that I experienced when looking over the five essays I submitted to THE OSCHOLARS archive. I was grateful to David Rose for initiating the project of archiving Wilde criticism. I was grateful for the technology that made retrieval of the material so easy. And, most of all, I was grateful that I could reread these essays without cringing over things I had written years ago.

A good part of the melioration from looking back at my essays came from Wilde himself. As I reread what I had written, I was struck less by my own interpretive views than by the opportunities that Wilde’s work offers us. At the center of his canon lies a generosity of spirit found in the greatest artists. Wilde’s writing resonates because it reflects a respect and trust for the read, engages us as partners in the creative process. In the most energetic fashion, it draws us into the aesthetic experience, calling forth our imaginative participation while refusing to prescribe a specific response.

In the essays that I have written on Wilde’s works, primarily The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, I have tried to highlight the ambiguities that Wilde introduces into his work rather than attempt to resolve them, even provisionally. Topics of identity—in the role of the Dandy and the Irishman—and of context—from the diverse perspectives offered on specific characters to the moral atmosphere and cultural context of the worlds they inhabit—have held my attention over the years that I have looked at Wilde’s writings. My own views on these topics have changed, but the gratitude that I feel for the imaginative invitations they present has remained constant.

Writing about the works of Oscar Wilde has become for me not an effort to illuminate his work but rather an attempt to understand the way that I am responding to it at any given moment. The joy I feel from reading Wilde comes to a great degree from an appreciation of its ability to spark my sense of self. For Wilde, the master of paradox, the greatest apparent contradiction within his works remains the fact that the author who projects so much self-absorption in fact stands adept as allowing readers to see themselves.


Gomel, Elana

Dr. Elana Gomel is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, which she chaired for two years. She is the author of several academic books and a number of articles, on topics ranging from science fiction to narrative theory, and from multiculturalism to Victorian literature. Her last book on the subject of the Russian-speaking community in Israel was published in Hebrew in 2006 and sparked off a lively debate. It is scheduled to be published in the United States soon. Currently Dr. Gomel is a Visiting Scholar at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University, California. 'Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author' was first published in Narrative: Journal of The Society for the Study of Narrative Literature Vol.12, Number 1 pp.7-92, January 2004) and is here republished by kind permission.

Link to homepage: http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/english/gomel.html


Halberstam, Judith

Judith Halberstam is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, working in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Her first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995) (from which her chapter here is taken), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Link to homepage: http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/faculty/faculty1003321.html


Musser, Charles

Charlie Musser is Professor of Film Studies and American Studies at Yale University, and Co-Chair of their Film Studies Program. His article 'The Hidden and the Unspeakable: On Theatrical Culture, Oscar Wilde and Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan' was first published in Film Studies Issue 4, Summer 2004 and is here republished by kind permission.

Link to homepage: http://www.yale.edu/filmstudiesprogram/faculty/musser.html


Pablé, Adrian

Adrian Pablé (PhD, University of Zürich) is currently working as Maître Assistant in English linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He has published two books and several articles in the domains of dialectology, translation, sociolinguistics and literary linguistics.  ‘The Importance of Re-Naming Ernest? Italian Translations of Oscar Wilde’ was first published in Target 17(2), pp. 279-308, 2005; and is here republished by kind permission.

Link to homepage: http://www.unil.ch/angl/page37400.html


Riquelme, John Paul

Widely known as a Joyce scholar, John Paul Riquelme teaches in the English Department as Boston University. He is currently working on a book on Wilde and modernism. His article 'Shalom / Solomon / Salome: Modernism & Wilde’s Æsthetic Politics', which we republish here by kind permission, was first published in The Centennial Review volume 39 no 3, Fall 1995.

Link to homepage: http://www.bu.edu/english/riquelme.html


Tyson, Nancy Jane

Nancy Jane Tyson (Ph.D., Ohio State, 1981) is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida specializing in nineteenth-century British literature and research methods for English studies. She has also published on Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell, Ruskin, Morris, and Dickens, and is currently researching the influence of Thackeray's literary rivalries on his development as a novelist.

Link to homepage: http://english.usf.edu/faculty/ntyson/


Waldrep, Shelton

Shelton Waldrep teaches in the English Department at the University of Southern Maine where he is the Director of the Graduate Certificate in Theory, Literature, and Culture. He has published numerous essays, poetry, and reviews, most recently “Nom de guerre: Homosociality in Timothy Findley’s The Wars” in Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of Heterosexuality in Literature (McFarland). A co- author of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (Duke), he has edited The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (Routledge) and Inauthentic Pleasures: Victorian Fakery and the Limitations of Form (SLI). His most recent book is The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (Minnesota. ‘The Æsthetic Realism of Dorian Gray’ was first published in Studies in the Literary Imagination 29(1) pp.102-12, spring 1996; and is here republished with kind permission.

Link to homepage: http://www.usm.maine.edu/eng/waldrep.html


Wood, Naomi

Naomi Wood is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, where she teaches children's literature, literature for adolescents, and the Victorian novel. Her article 'Gold Standards and Silver Subversions: Treasure Island and the Romance of Money' received an honor award for criticism from the Children's Literature Association in 1999. She has published on Victorian fantasists, Walt Disney's Cinderella, and modern works of fantasy by Virginia Hamilton and others. She is currently engaged in a major project on works by H. C. Andersen, C. Kingsley, G. MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and P. Pullman. 'Paterian aesthetics, pederasty, and Oscar Wilde's fairy tales' was first published in Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 October 2002 pp.156-170, and is here reproduced by kind permission.

Link to homepage: http://www.k-state.edu/english/people/alph/wood.html


Zwigtman, Floortje

Floortje Zwigtman is a prizewinning novelist for young adults. Two of her books featuring Adrian Mayfield and his adventures in the London gay underworld of the 1890s have been published in Dutch, and reviewed in both THE OSCHOLARS and rue des beaux arts (reviews by Tine Englebert and Petra Kerkhove). The third and final volume of this trilogy, largely set in Paris, is now in preparation. Many of the people of the Wilde circle appear in these books. We are grateful to Mevr. Zwigtman for sending us this material.


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