🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
MERLIN HOLLAND’S GUEST APPEARANCE ON ROSEBUD
Merlin Holland is the grandson of the great poet, playwright and paragon of late Victorian decadence, Oscar Wilde. Merlin’s story, and that of his family, is captivating.
Continue reading “Merlin Holland on Rosebud”
Quirky images related to Oscar Wilde, or not.
© John Cooper, 2024.
Launching Yellow Nineties 2.0: A Symposium & Celebration
Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities
—Virtual Symposium—
Thursday, April 18th from 9:30am – 5:00pm EST
A big thank you to kind users for their private comments about recent posts.
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© John Cooper, 2024.
Oscar Wilde’s symbolist play Salome is notable for its licentious artwork by Aubrey Beardsley. But Beardsley’s infamous illustrations appeared only when the English edition of the play was released in 1894.
When the original French Salomé had been published a year earlier, it contained no illustrations pertinent to the text. The only graphical representation in the French edition was the Rops Vignette, which had nothing to do with Wilde’s play, but it rivals Beardsley in its decadence.
So what is the Rops Vignette?
Continue reading “The Rops Vignette”
Clay bust of Oscar Wilde, 1914. Numa Patlagean (1888—1961).
Oscar Wilde’s modeling career has been under discussion recently.
I refer, of course, to the art of sculpture, a subject that held a fascination for Oscar: he referenced it in his essays on art, and in his reviews of art galleries; he bought sculptures, commissioned sculptures, and even had his hair styled after a bust of Nero in the Louvre.
Oscar used say that he could only think in stories and correspondingly asserted that a sculptor thinks only in the raw material of his art. He told André Gide, “the sculptor doesn’t try to translate his thought into marble; he thinks in marble, directly”. 1 This thought echoes the symbolism of Oscar’s table talk about a man who thought only in bronze melting down the statue of eternal sadness that adorned his wife’s grave, and making of it a bronze homage to the joy which dwells only in the moment.
Continue reading “Numa Patlagean”
—Updated from its original posting in 2015—
State penitentiaries are not generally considered tourist destinations.
Yet in a curious twist in Oscar Wilde’s conventional social activity during his lecture tour of North America in 1882, he took the opportunity to visit TWO American state prisons within the space of three days: one during a train stop on his way to lecture in Atchison, KS; and a second (along with its insane asylum) before his next evening lecture in Lincoln, NE.
Did Wilde have a special interest in places of incarceration? Or, aware of his appeal to notoriety, was fate prefiguring for him a life on the inside?
Continue reading “Some Common Prisoner”