Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521516921)

'I love acting - it is so much more real than life, ' Oscar Wilde famously wrote. Acting Wilde demonstrates that Wilde's plays, fiction, and critical theory are organised by the idea that all so-called 'reality' is a mode of performance, and that the 'meanings' of life are really the scripted elements of a dramatic spectacle. Wilde's real issue was whether one could become the author of his own script, the creator of the character and role he inhabits. It was a question he struggled to answer from the beginning of his career to the end, whether in his position as the pre-eminent dramatist in English or as the beleaguered defendant on trial for 'gross indecency'. Introducing important evidence from Wilde's career-launching tour of America, the often tortured revisions of his plays, and the recently discovered written record of his first courtroom trial, this book reconstructs Wilde's strategic dramatising of himself

Author: Kerry Powell
ISBN-10: 0521516927
ISBN-13: 9780521516921
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/15/2009
Pages: 216
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.60d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2010