#WILDE CHICAGO SERIES#

Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain.

Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century.

Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury’s horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. This project is entirely informed by original research.“I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad,” Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom-which erupted in laughter-accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. In the world of Wilde scholarship there exists much historical information relating to his time in America: works, ephemera, photographs, quotations, interviews, and more are collected on this web site. This web site examines the background to the play. In August 1883 Wilde's early, and unsuccessful, play Vera or, The Nihilists was staged-and Wilde made a second visit to America for a month to oversee the production. But it is an under-appreciated fact that the first ever production of an Oscar Wilde play was in New York many years before his great success on the London stage. There have been countless thousands of performances of Wilde's plays worldwide in the last 130 years. Here you can learn about each of the photographs, including the famous Number 18 which was instrumental in establishing the U.S. This web site is the only repository in book form or online where all of those photographs are displayed in one place.

#WILDE CHICAGO SERIES#

It was also shortly after his arrival in New York that Wilde had a series of photographs taken that have come to define the image we have of him today. It is a major focus of this web site to provide a definitive itinerary of the lecture tour utilizing modern methods of archival research. The itinerary of this formative lecture tour has never before been precisely compiled-there have been several major previously published versions but none agrees with any other, and all contain inaccuracies. Oscar Wilde's first visit to North America was for the entire year of 1882, during which time he conducting a lecture tour across the continent, including two tours of Canada, in which he undertook some 141 lectures. People are sometimes surprised to learn that early in his career Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the poet, playwright, and wit famous for his flamboyant, dramatic, and ultimately tragic life in London and Paris, made two visits to America and Canada.įurther, that each of these visits was important variously in informing his personal development, works, and legacy.

Wilde chicago