Acting Wilde
Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde

A revealing insight into Wilde's courtroom trials as they really happened, examining his deep immersion in late Victorian gender wars.

Kerry Powell (Author)

9780521516921, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 October 2009

216 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.4 cm, 0.48 kg

'… Powell's book is distinctive for its historicizing approach and its well-informed reliance on pre-publication materials …' Modern Drama

'I love acting - it is so much more real than life,' Oscar Wilde famously wrote. Acting Wilde demonstrates that Wilde's plays, fiction, and critical theory are organised by the idea that all so-called 'reality' is a mode of performance, and that the 'meanings' of life are really the scripted elements of a dramatic spectacle. Wilde's real issue was whether one could become the author of his own script, the creator of the character and role he inhabits. It was a question he struggled to answer from the beginning of his career to the end, whether in his position as the pre-eminent dramatist in English or as the beleaguered defendant on trial for 'gross indecency'. Introducing important evidence from Wilde's career-launching tour of America, the often tortured revisions of his plays, and the recently discovered written record of his first courtroom trial, this book reconstructs Wilde's strategic dramatising of himself.

Introduction: Acting Wilde
1. Posing and dis-posing: Oscar Wilde in America and beyond
2. Pure Wilde: feminism and masculinity in Lady Windermere's Fan, Salomé, and A Woman of No Importance
3. Performance anxiety in An Ideal Husband
4. Performativity and history: The Importance of Being Earnest
5. The 'lost' transcript, sexual acting, and the meaning of Wilde's trials
6. Prison performativity
Epilogue: Wilde and modern drama
Bibliography of manuscripts and printed sources.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], Theatre studies [AN]