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REVISITING THE “IRISH DIMENSION” IN OSCAR WILDE'S THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2014

Richard Haslam
Richard Haslam*
Affiliation:
Saint Joseph's University
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Extract

The concept of “The Irish Wilde” achieved considerable prominence during the 1990s, due to the advocacy and scholarship of Davis Coakley, Owen Dudley Edwards, Declan Kiberd, Jerusha McCormack, Richard Pine, and David Upchurch, among others. However, as the decade drew to a close, the scholarly calibration of distinctively Irish elements in Wilde's literary works began to become a matter of dispute. In his 2000 survey of emerging trends, Ian Small listed “The Irish Wilde,” along with “The Gay Wilde” and “Wilde & Consumerism,” as significant “recent paradigms” (Recent 38, 37-78). Nonetheless, he cautioned that such thematic pigeonholes as Irishness and gayness may “rely upon highly selective details of the life which in turn are used to instruct us in how to read the works” (7). Small's wariness resurfaced in his judgment that some contributions in McCormack's anthology Wilde the Irishman “are highly speculative and seem to strain to make connections,” so that “the ‘Irish dimension’ (for the want of a better term) seems rather gratuitously tacked on” (67). These reservations about methodology were subsequently echoed by Bruce Bashford, who critiqued the strategy of “reasoning by analogy” employed by Kiberd and Pine in their attempts to Hibernicize Wilde's works (617).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 267 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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