Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Decline and fall
- PART ONE STRANGE CASES, COMMON FATES
- 1 Strange cases, common fates: degeneration and fiction in the Victorian fin de siècle
- 2 The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde
- 3 Wilde's trials: reading erotics and the erotics of reading
- PART TWO BETWEEN THE BODY AND HISTORY
- PART THREE THE SINS OF EMPIRE
- Conclusion: Modernist empires and the rise of English
- Notes
- Index
3 - Wilde's trials: reading erotics and the erotics of reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Decline and fall
- PART ONE STRANGE CASES, COMMON FATES
- 1 Strange cases, common fates: degeneration and fiction in the Victorian fin de siècle
- 2 The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde
- 3 Wilde's trials: reading erotics and the erotics of reading
- PART TWO BETWEEN THE BODY AND HISTORY
- PART THREE THE SINS OF EMPIRE
- Conclusion: Modernist empires and the rise of English
- Notes
- Index
Summary
POSING
The first English edition of Nordau's Degeneration appeared in February 1895, the same month that the Marquess of Queensberry left a calling card for Oscar Wilde with an insult scrawled on its face. Queensberry's handwriting proved difficult to decipher, but one misspelled word - “Somdomite” - was legible enough for Wilde to feel justified in bringing a suit for libel against his tormentor. The disastrous trial that ensued led directly to Wilde's arrest and subsequent conviction for “acts of gross indecency” under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which prohibited sexual relations between men. The press coverage of the three proceedings involving Wilde was extensive and highly sensational. During these same months Degeneration enjoyed mostly favorable reviews in the papers, and Nordau's book was often used to gloss the dramatic events taking place at the Old Bailey. After the inconclusive close of the second trial, for instance, an editorialist in Reynolds' Newspaper wrote:
It is certain that this whole case has stamped as pernicious the kind of literature with which Wilde's name is closely identified. That literature is one of the most diseased products of a diseased-time. Indeed, so far as English writers are concerned, we do not know where we should find all the worst characteristics of our decadent civilization - its morbidity, its cold heartless brilliance, its insolent cynicism, its hatred of all rational restraint, its suggestiveness - more accurately mirrored than in the writings of Oscar Wilde. […]
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- Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de SiècleIdentity and Empire, pp. 54 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996