Description:
While Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde is considered by many to be the authoritative work on the writer, its portrait of the artist as a grand tragic figure precludes a more detailed discussion of the importance of Wilde's gayness in his life as well as the enormity of the homophobia that shaped his career. Gary Schmidgall's The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar is a soundly researched and persuasively argued critical biography that takes seriously the claim that Wilde is the father of contemporary gay sensibility and delineates the myriad meanings of that assertion. So much of Wilde's story has been told that Schmidgall occasionally retreads the obvious, but the strength of The Stranger Wilde is its startling original historical investigations and insights. Schmidgall, for instance, has uncovered numerous cartoons and satires from Punch that exposes the entrenchment of 19th-century British homophobia. He has also uncovered a plethora of personal information about Wilde, much of it--including a likely sexual relationship with acclaimed (but now forgotten) American playwright Clyde Fitch--never before published. The Stranger Wilde is an important, startling reevaluation of the writer that will be a cornerstone for further research into Wilde and gay studies, separately and together. --Michael Bronski
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