Ellmann wilde biography samples
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Oscar Wilde
And because I am not Oscar Wilde, because someone’s body fryst vatten thinning in the dirt, inom can still say this. säga, through this blue sheen, that he (Did you know they found shit smeared on the sheets of his bed? That boys young enough to klättra stairs climbed the stairs of his suite?) that Oscar Wilde bled from the eyes and mouth right before—
And I wonder (justly) if something might have exploded there, in his head, maybe something in the ear, something eating straight through. Maybe it was a little itch, a syphilis, that scratched the eyes’ interior. A disease that lived inside the ton
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Reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde a dozen years ago, I rejoiced that someone had moved sex from the center of Wilde’s life in beställning to present him instead as a great Irish writer. Re-reading Ellmann today, I can’t help feeling that in so generously accepting Wilde’s homosexuality, Ellmann had also put it on one side or, in the jargon of today, “marginalized” it. Which might not much matter, except that in the work of Oscar’s full maturity (1885–1895), a homosexual dynamic is omnipresent, even when it might at first seem totally absent.
On this point two subsequent biographers—Gary Schmidgall (1994) and Barbara Belford (2000)—have supplemented Ellmann’s account and, it could be said, corrected it. At the time, Oscar the polemicist was telling critics and readers not to look for the author in any literary work but only for an objective creation. What our recent biographers have been showing is that, in his stories and in his plays, Oscar Wilde was constantly, even am
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Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann
The Aesthete
Oscar Wilde.
by Richard Ellmann.
Knopf. 632 pp. $24.95.
In recent decades Oscar Wilde has enjoyed a run on the intellectual exchange like no other Victorian. “With each passing year the figure of Wilde becomes clearer and larger,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972, not going quite so far as Harold Bloom, who recently included Wilde on his short list of writers who will be crucial to postmodern culture, the others being Emerson, Nietzsche, Pater, and Freud. Dismissed by the first generation of literary modernists as a relic of the Yellow 90’s, Wilde has since been proclaimed the patron saint of Camp by Susan Sontag and identified as an early, brilliant avatar of the “therapeutic” by Philip Rieff. His rehabilitation has been all the more remarkable in that among his works only The Importance of Being Earnest still has currency. The play is Wilde’s masterpiece, the most sublime stage farce ever wri