The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment

by Alan Sinfield

Book Overview

For 15 years in Victorian England, Oscar Wilde was able to carry on like the famous camp queen of our imaginings - effete, leisured, aesthetic, amoral, decadent, dandified. This work explores how... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231101678
• ISBN13: 9780231101677
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

One of the best gay literary studies in the past decade

After a spate of books in queer studies anachronistically identifying this or that work as "gay," Alan Sinfield produced this thoughtful, accessible book that gives gay readings their due while simultaneously attempting to read things with a sense of historical responsibility, postulating the Oscar Wilde trial of 1896 as a marker for the formation of a queer identity that incorporates effeminacy into its battery of indicators. A smart, responsible, and well-written study.

Flaming

"The Wilde Century" positions Oscar Wilde as the archetypal queer of the 20th Century (although perhaps not too far beyond), and as such it's insightful and enormously entertaining. Those not familiar with gender studies will marvel as Sinfield neatly constructs a convincing paradigm of queer/homosexual history. If you'd like a readable introduction to the germ of queer theory I'd recommend this book.