The Invention of Oscar Wilde

The Invention of Oscar Wilde
Author: Nicholas Frankel
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1789144221

“One should either wear a work of art, or be a work of art,” Oscar Wilde once declared. In The Invention of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel explores Wilde’s self-creation as a “work of art” and a carefully constructed cultural icon. Frankel takes readers on a journey through Wilde’s inventive, provocative life, from his Irish origins—and their public erasure—through his challenges to traditional concepts of masculinity and male sexuality, his marriage and his affairs with young men, including his great love Lord Alfred Douglas, to his criminal conviction and final years of exile in France. Along the way, Frankel takes a deep look at Wilde’s writings, paradoxical wit, and intellectual convictions.

Making Oscar Wilde

Making Oscar Wilde
Author: Michèle Mendelssohn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0198802366

Packed with new evidence, Making Oscar Wilde tells the untold story of a local Irish eccentric who became a global cultural icon. This must-read book dramatizes Oscar Wilde's remarkable rise in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Michèle Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history to reveal a life like no other.

The Book Fancier

The Book Fancier
Author: Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1886
Genre: Bibliography
ISBN:

Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity

Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity
Author: David M. Friedman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-10-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393245918

The story of Oscar Wilde’s landmark 1882 American tour explains how this quotable literary eminence became famous for being famous. On January 3, 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old “genius”—at least by his own reckoning—arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made such a spectacle of himself in London with his eccentric fashion sense, acerbic wit, and extravagant passion for art and home design that Gilbert & Sullivan wrote an operetta lampooning him. He was hired to go to America to promote that work by presenting lectures on interior decorating. But Wilde had his own business plan. He would go to promote himself. And he did, traveling some 15,000 miles and visiting 150 American cities as he created a template for fame creation that still works today. Though Wilde was only the author of a self-published book of poems and an unproduced play, he presented himself as a “star,” taking the stage in satin breeches and a velvet coat with lace trim as he sang the praises of sconces and embroidered pillows—and himself. What Wilde so presciently understood is that fame could launch a career as well as cap one. David M. Friedman’s lively and often hilarious narrative whisks us across nineteenth-century America, from the mansions of Gilded Age Manhattan to roller-skating rinks in Indiana, from an opium den in San Francisco to the bottom of the Matchless silver mine in Colorado—then the richest on earth—where Wilde dined with twelve gobsmacked miners, later describing their feast to his friends in London as “First course: whiskey. Second course: whiskey. Third course: whiskey.” But, as Friedman shows, Wilde was no mere clown; he was a strategist. From his antics in London to his manipulation of the media—Wilde gave 100 interviews in America, more than anyone else in the world in 1882—he designed every move to increase his renown. There had been famous people before him, but Wilde was the first to become famous for being famous. Wilde in America is an enchanting tale of travel and transformation, comedy and capitalism—an unforgettable story that teaches us about our present as well as our past.

Who Invented Oscar Wilde?

Who Invented Oscar Wilde?
Author: David Newhoff
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1640123881

In early 1882, before young Oscar Wilde embarked on his lecture tour across America, he posed for publicity photos taken by a famously eccentric New York photographer named Napoleon Sarony. Few would guess that one of those photographs would become the subject of the Supreme Court case that challenged copyright protection for all photography—a constitutional question that asked how a machine-made image could possibly be a work of human creativity. Who Invented Oscar Wilde? is a story about the nature of authorship and the “convenient fiction” we call copyright. While a seemingly obscure topic, copyright has been a hotly contested issue almost since the day the internet became publicly accessible. The presumed obsolescence of authorial rights in this age of abundant access has fueled a debate that reaches far beyond the question of compensation for authors of works. Much of the literature on the subject is either highly academic, highly critical of copyright, or both. With a light and balanced touch, David Newhoff makes a case for intellectual property law, tracing the concept of authorship from copyright’s ancient beginnings to its adoption in American culture to its eventual confrontation with photography and its relevance in the digital age. Newhoff tells a little-known story that will appeal to a broad spectrum of interests while making an argument that copyright is an essential ingredient to upholding the principles on which liberal democracy is founded.

The Fall of the House of Wilde

The Fall of the House of Wilde
Author: Emer O'Sullivan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2017-02-23
Genre: Authors, Irish
ISBN: 1408863162

________________'Emer O'Sullivan has made an indispensable contribution to Wildean literature ... Compelling, informative and fascinating' - Stephen Fry 'Vivid and meticulously researched ... The name of Wilde stands for "what is singular, independent-minded, and fearless". Words that also describe this splendid book *****' - Frances Wilson, Mail on Sunday'O'Sullivan vividly evokes the cultural vitalities Oscar inherited from the house he was born into ... Hugely readable' - John Sutherland, The Times________________Oscar Wilde's father - scientist, surgeon, archaeologist, writer - was one of the most eminent men of his generation. His mother - poet, journalist, translator - hosted an influential salon at 1 Merrion Square. Together they were one of Victorian Ireland's most dazzling and enlightened couples. When, in 1864, Sir William Wilde was accused of sexually assaulting a female patient, it sent shock waves through Dublin society. After his death some ten years later, Jane attempted to re-establish the family in London, where Oscar burst irrepressibly upon the scene, only to fall in a trial as public as his father's. A remarkable and perceptive account, The Fall of the House of Wilde is a major repositioning of our first modern celebrity, a man whose fall from grace marked the end of fin de siècle decadence.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde
Author: Matthew Sturgis
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 865
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525656367

The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human—account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life. "Simply the best modern biography of Wilde." —Evening Standard Drawing on material that has come to light in the past thirty years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us Wilde's own experience as he experienced it. Here, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; a dreamy, aloof boy; a stellar classicist at boarding school; a born entertainer with a talent for comedy and a need for an audience; his years at Oxford, a brilliant undergraduate punctuated by his reckless disregard for authority . . . his arrival in London, in 1878, "already noticeable everywhere" . . . his ten-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, the father of two boys; Constance unwittingly welcoming young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers, and dying in exile at the age of thirty-nine . . . Wilde's development as a playwright. . . becoming the high priest of the aesthetic movement; his successes . . . his celebrity. . . and in later years, his irresistible pull toward another—double—life, in flagrant defiance and disregard of England's strict sodomy laws ("the blackmailer's charter"); the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years at hard labor, destroying his life and shattering his soul.

Murder at the Falls

Murder at the Falls
Author: Arlene Kay
Publisher: Lyrical Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1516109325

Army vet Persephone “Perri” Morgan has found a second career handcrafting leather pet accessories—and a satisfying sideline in training therapy dogs. But there’s no cure for a cold-blooded murderer. . . . Perri and her BFF Babette Croy team up to bring their therapy dogs to an upscale senior living facility. But The Falls’ pleasant façade hides some unpleasant secrets. Valuables are missing, feuds fester, and one resident even fears for her life. Sprightly senior Magdalen Melmoth swears she’s being targeted because her grandfather was none other than Oscar Wilde, and her legacy includes an unpublished novel by the literary genius. Convinced it’ll take more than calming canines to sniff out the truth, Perri enlists the help of her beau, hotshot reporter Wing Pruett. When a nurse is poisoned by chocolates sent to Magdalen, and a physician is brutally murdered, the case takes a deeply troubling turn. Perri, Babette, and their furry friends race to bring a killer to heel, but can they outsmart an enemy who’s simply bad to the bone?

Free Ride

Free Ride
Author: Robert Levine
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0385533772

How did the newspaper, music, and film industries go from raking in big bucks to scooping up digital dimes? Their customers were lured away by the free ride of technology. Now, business journalist Robert Levine shows how they can get back on track. On the Internet, “information wants to be free.” This memorable phrase shaped the online business model, but it is now driving the media companies on whom the digital industry feeds out of business. Today, newspaper stocks have fallen to all-time lows as papers are pressured to give away content, music sales have fallen by more than half since file sharing became common, TV ratings are plum­meting as viewership migrates online, and publishers face off against Amazon over the price of digital books. In Free Ride, Robert Levine narrates an epic tale of value destruction that moves from the corridors of Congress, where the law was passed that legalized YouTube, to the dorm room of Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster; from the bargain-pricing dramas involving iTunes and Kindle to Google’s fateful decision to digitize first and ask questions later. Levine charts how the media industry lost control of its destiny and suggests innovative ways it can resist the pull of zero. Fearless in its reporting and analysis, Free Ride is the busi­ness history of the decade and a much-needed call to action.

Constance

Constance
Author: Franny Moyle
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2012-10-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1453271481

“Tells the poignant story of Constance in the aftermath of Wilde’s trials and imprisonment, and of her brave attempts to keep in contact with him despite her suffering.” —The Irish Times In the spring of 1895 the life of Constance Wilde changed irrevocably. Up until the conviction of her husband, Oscar, for homosexual crimes, she had held a privileged position in society. Part of a gilded couple, she was a popular children’s author, a fashion icon, and a leading campaigner for women’s rights. A founding member of the magical society The Golden Dawn, her pioneering and questioning spirit encouraged her to sample some of the more controversial aspects of her time. Mrs. Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in her own right. But that spring Constance’s entire life was eclipsed by scandal. Forced to flee to the Continent with her two sons, her glittering literary and political career ended abruptly. She lived in exile until her death. Franny Moyle now tells Constance’s story with a fresh eye. Drawing on numerous unpublished letters, she brings to life the story of a woman at the heart of fin-de-siècle London and the Aesthetic movement. In a compelling and moving tale of an unlikely couple caught up in a world unsure of its moral footing, Moyle unveils the story of a woman who was the victim of one of the greatest betrayals of all time.