Courses

This seminar will consider all of Oscar Wilde’s major works – his plays, his novel, his stories for children, his poetry, his essays, his letter from prison. It will also look at an area of Wilde’s work that has not received very much attention – his journalism and his speeches in America and the relationship of his own work to the writings of his parents.

Wilde emerges, deliberately, as a character of great ambiguity, both Irish and English, both political and playful, both homosexual and family man, both dramatist and moralist, both cosmopolitan and Londoner, both flippant and earnest. Since it is impossible to view Wilde’s work without also considering the life, then the seminar will examine both his letters and his ‘De Profundis.’