Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books

By Nicholas Frankel

Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books addresses Wilde's obsession with the visual appearance or "look" of his published writings. It examines the role played by graphic designers in the production of Wilde's writings and demonstrates how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Nicholas Frankel approaches Wilde's writings as graphical or "printed" phenomena that reveal their significance through the beautiful and elaborate decorations with which they were published in Wilde's own lifetime. With extensive reference to and exposition on Wilde's theoretical writings and letters, the author shows that, far from being marginal elements of the literary text, these decorative devices were central to Wilde's understanding of his own writings as well as to his "aesthetic" theory of language. Extensive illustrations support Frankel's arguments. The first part of the book lays out a broadly historical view of Wilde's writings, emphasizing their volatility at the hands of time as well as Wilde's changing conceptions of his own work. The second part demonstrates the significance that Wilde and his publishers attached to the process of graphic design, showing how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Both parts stress the importance of late-Victorian publishing practices to our understanding of Wilde's writings. The book further challenges the prevailing view of Wilde as essentially a playwright, demonstrating the importance of poetry to Wilde's own understanding of himself as an author.The book attempts to do justice to Wilde's own valorization of literature as one of the decorative arts. By emphasizing the visual and collaborative dimensions of Wilde's texts, Frankel argues that visual decoration was central to Wilde's theory of language as well as his practice as a writer. Anticipating Baudrillard's distinctionbetween appearance and the transparency, of the sign, Wilde's writings argue that literary language is both a visual and a material phenomenon -- what Wilde himself would call a "beautiful untrue thing" -- that demands to be read with the eye as much as the brain.This book will appeal to specialists of Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de si cle, to textual and literary scholars, art historians, and linguistic philosophers interested in the graphical nature of the linguistic sign.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472110691
• ISBN13: 9780472110698
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.4"