Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde

By Kerry Powell

Book Overview

'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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521283388
• ISBN13: 9780521283380
• Release Date: June 2011
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"