The Picture of Dorian Gray in the Twenty-First Century: New Essays on Oscar Wilde's Classic Novel

by Richard A. Kaye (Editor)

Overview

This collection of new essays devoted to Oscar Wilde's classic novel presents new critical work by prominent scholars that deal with numerous aspects of the famed novel. Essays range from early literary influences on the novel and its controversial early reception to its afterlife in literature, film, dance, photography, theatre, and television. In addition to considering Dorian Gray as an iconic queer work of fiction that daringly challenged late-Victorian literary practices, the volume explores Wilde's novel in terms of the history of the European novel and the book's innovations as a gothic, supernatural work that defied the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. Along with striking illustrations of the novel since its publication --including images from popular adaptations-- the volume includes never-before translated early reviews of the novel in the European press along with an unpublished parody of Wilde's novel in the form of an "examination paper" by the English writer Max Beerbohm. Edited by Richard Kaye, this volume offers multiple and fascinating perspectives on Oscar Wilde's classic in fourteen highly readable essays.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190659059
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/20/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	21 MB
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About the Author

Richard A. Kaye is Professor of English at Hunter College and in the Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the editor of The D. H. Lawrence Review, the fifty-year old scholarly journal devoted to the British writer.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Haunting of Dorian GrayThe Precedents, Sources, and Literary Contexts of Dorian Gray1. The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Aesthetic Tradition: Faithful Allusion, Perilous Misquotation2. The Picture That Failed, or the Light of Dorian Gray3. "What Never Dies": The Picture of Dorian Gray and Its Afterlife in French Literature and ArtThe Visual Imagination of The Picture of Dorian Gray4. Picturing Dorian: Temporality, Abstraction, and Modernity in The Picture of Dorian Gray5. Illustrating Dorian Gray: The Contingent Ephemerality of BeautyDorian Gray's Philosophical, Cultural, and Erotic Entanglements6. The Vitality of Dorian Gray: Darwinism, Philosophy, Life7. "A Form of Reverie, a Malady of Dreaming": Dorian Gray, Personality, and Mass Culture8. Dorian Gray's Generic Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Queer FormThe Formal Vicissitudes of a Decadent Novel9. Exquisite Fantasy: Language and Anti-Mimesis in The Picture of Dorian Gray10. Fin-de-Siècle Feelings: Melodrama and the Aesthetics and Ethics of Emotion in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray11. The Most Decadent Chapter: Ornamentation, Influence, and the Challenge to Realism in The Picture of Dorian GrayDorian Gray's Afterlife in Fiction, Film, Theater, Dance, and Performance12. The Vienna "Dorian Gray Epidemic" of 1907: Theatrical Distortion, Critical Dissent, and the First Stagings of Wilde's Novel13. Red Herrings and Yellow Birds: The 1945 Hollywood Film The Picture of Dorian Gray14. Dorian Gray Forever: Decadence, Glamor, and the Vicissitudes of Pop Culture Adaptation