Joseph Bristow, ed. Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend. Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8214-1838-3. Price: US$59.95

This well-illustrated collection of twelve essays edited and introduced with commitment and care by the distinguished critic Joseph Bristow, has a main thread: that the disappearance of Oscar Wilde’s influence after his arrest and imprisonment in 1895 has been much exaggerated. Without arguing narrowly for this thread as a thesis, nearly all the essays provide evidence for the claim as Bristow tactfully formulates it in his Preface: “that although Wilde’s name remained a source of prurient interest for many years after his death, a growing number of supporters during the earlier parts of the twentieth century publicly recognized his significance as a critical thinker, playwright, and novelist of the Victorian fin de siècle” (xxix). This historical, historicizing assertion beneficially challenges the notion that Wilde’s legacy was shrouded in shame and obscurity until the revolution in sexual attitudes late in the third quarter of the twentieth century brought him suddenly back to prominence virtually ex nihilo. Instead of seeing Wilde as a gay skeleton shrouded in the closet for three-quarters of a century, Bristow emphasizes a vibrant, almost immediate resurgence in Wilde’s presence and influence, beginning in the first decade after his death in 1900, with Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé and Robert Ross’s edition of De Profundis (both 1905). The editor’s organizing and interpretive presence is extensive and salutary. His detailed Chronology, Preface, and Introduction constitute one-fifth of the book. The Chronology is in itself a valuable contribution that extends from Wilde’s birth in 1854 through 2008, including selective but also abundant listings of biographical, critical, and artistic works that respond to Wilde’s life and writings. Bristow’s lengthy Introduction presents movingly from diverse perspectives the painful collapse of Wilde’s reputation and the reversal that, according to Bristow, started almost immediately. Rather than accepting an anachronistic mapping of the cultural recovery of Wilde as a postmodern phenomenon, the collection traces Wilde’s modernity primarily in the context of late nineteenth-century culture. Bristow describes Wilde’s rehabilitation not as a leap from enforced obscurity, but as a complex, gradual matter (x-xi), a steady reappraisal whose tipping point is Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1987). The collection’s act of historical recovery contributes significantly to late-Victorian and modernist literary studies. Its virtues are evident in the new sense that the volume makes of Wilde in his time and later. The essays are original, detailed, and diverse. The first three examine Wilde’s engagements in his own time with developments we would call modern. Lucy McDiarmid’s lively opening essay concerning the politics of late-Victorian table-talk brings out the political edge of that engagement in Wilde’s risky social encounters with power brokers who turned against him (though some aristocrats, including W. S. Blunt, the poet and Irish Home Rule advocate, did not). Daniel Novak’s suggestive essay on Napoleon Sarony’s iconic celebrity photographs of Wilde in America establishes Wilde’s involvement physically and aesthetically in the issue of the ownership of represented images that arose with photography’s emergence. Does the photographer who posed Wilde have rights to the image, or is it the possession of the artist in the photo who was posing in another sense? Erin Hyman’s essay contributes to our understanding of both theatre history and Wilde’s affiliation with anarchist politics by presenting the remarkable circumstances of Lugné-Poe’s first-ever staging of Salomé in Paris in 1896 as an act of anarchist solidarity with the imprisoned Wilde. Like several other essayists, Hyman provides important details about Wilde’s influence crossing the Channel before his death and in the years immediately following it, a crossing recognized before but not regularly explored with such specificity. The six middle essays take up the importance of …