Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century
Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small
Abstract
This book is a materialist account of Wilde's career as a writer. It contests three widely held assumptions about his success: that there is a clear distinction between his life as a journalist and his artistic celebrity; that he was an aesthetic ‘purist’ in his attitude towards his own books; and that his career was driven by oppositional sexual or nationalist politics. The authors bring together evidence from the publishing trade, from Wilde's contracts and correspondence with publishers, and from documentation about his earnings (particularly the plays) to show that he always worked for mon ... More
This book is a materialist account of Wilde's career as a writer. It contests three widely held assumptions about his success: that there is a clear distinction between his life as a journalist and his artistic celebrity; that he was an aesthetic ‘purist’ in his attitude towards his own books; and that his career was driven by oppositional sexual or nationalist politics. The authors bring together evidence from the publishing trade, from Wilde's contracts and correspondence with publishers, and from documentation about his earnings (particularly the plays) to show that he always worked for money, but that he achieved far less financial success than is usually thought. Far from subverting the nascent consumerism of his time, he was thoroughly immersed in its values — in the commodification of culture in which books became product. At the same time, the book provides a detailed account of Wilde's processes of composition: it surveys his writing practices across the whole of the oeuvre, and radically reinterprets the significance of his revision and ‘plagiarism’.
Keywords:
Oscar Wilde,
revision,
plagiarism,
consumerism,
professional writer,
correspondence,
composition,
writing practice,
nineteenth century
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2000 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198187288 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187288.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Josephine M. Guy, author
University of Nottingham
Ian Small, author
University of Birmingham
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