Abstract
In previous chapters I have traced Wilde’s anti-mimetic aesthetic and his investment in non-realist traditions. This investment was manifested in a refusal to allow the literal and empirical to overcome the imaginative and the lyrical in his writings. I have shown that Wilde derived much from his parents’ folkloric and literary work, and also from their political commitment to Irish nationalism. It seems important at this point to move to a delineation of the precise nature of Wilde’s own relationship to what we can broadly term ‘political theory’ and investigate what connection this relationship has with the Irish nationalist background I have established as crucial for understanding his literary work.
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Notes
Percival W. H. Almy, ‘New Views of Mr Oscar Wilde’, Theatre 23 (March 1894), 124, quoted in Mikhail, Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, 232.
Isobel Murray, ‘Oscar Wilde and Individualism: Contexts for The Soul of Man’, Durham University Journal 83: 2 (July 1991), 195–207
J. D. Thomas, ‘ “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”: an Essay in Context’, Rice University Studies 51: 1 (1965), 83–95 (85–8).
George Woodcock, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 153.
Josephine M. Guy, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”: a (Con)Textual History’, Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 59–85.
See also, David Rose, ‘Oscar Wilde: Socialite or Socialist?’, The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years, eds Ewe Boker, Richard Corballis and Julie Hibbard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 35–55.
R. N. Berki, Socialism (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), 12.
John Goode, ‘Gissing, Morris, and English Socialism’, Victorian Studies 12: 2 (December 1968), 201–26 (226).
Vincent, K. Steven, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 47.
Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. 2, Socialist Thought: Marxism and Anarchism, 1850–1890 (London: Macmillan, 1954)
Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London: Croom Helm, 1983).
David Miller, Anarchism (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1984).
Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘Anarchism in British Public Opinion, 1880–1914’, Victorian Studies 31: 4 (Summer 1988), 487–516 (488).
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5, ed. R. H. Super, assist. Sister Marion Hoctor (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1965), 121–2.
Arnold ‘From Easter to August’, Nineteenth Century 22 (September 1887), 321. This is astutely pointed out by McCormack, ‘Wilde Irishman’, footnote 28.
Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 14–18.
Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Oscar Wilde: the Soul of Man under Hibernicism’, Irish Studies Review 11 (Summer 1995), 7–13 (11).
See W. J. McCormack, ‘Wilde and Parnell’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1998), 95–102 (101).
Quoted in Tony Claydon, ‘The Political Thought of Charles Stewart Parnell’, Parnell in Perspective, eds D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 151–70 (163).
Quoted in Paul Bew, C. S. Parnell (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980), 33.
L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington D. C and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 41–4.
Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book By a Man Too Busy to Write One (1881; New York, 1969), 414.
Eamonn Hughes, ‘Joyce and Catholicism’, Irish Writers and Religion, ed. Robert Welch (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), 116–38 (125).
Henry Edward Manning, Miscellanies, 3 vols (London: Burns and Oates, 1877–88), vol. 1, 229.
Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (Lincoln-London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 278.
For this encyclical and Catholic social policy in general, see Donal Dorr, Option for the Poor: a Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983).
Oscar Wilde, ‘Review of Mr Froude’s Blue Book (The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: or An Irish Romance of the Last Century)’, Pall Mall Gazette 13 April 1889, in Collected Works, vol. XIII, 476–82.
Christopher Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 11–29.
For this lecture, see Kevin O’ Brien, ‘ “The House Beautiful”: a Reconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s American Lecture’, Victorian Studies 17 (1974), 395–418.
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© 2005 Jarlath Killeen
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Killeen, J. (2005). Religion and Politics: Wilde’s Social Philosophy. In: The Faiths of Oscar Wilde. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503557_5
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