For nearly a century, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) has been seen primarily as a "British" writer—a description that ignores his Irish parentage and the experience of the first twenty years of his life. In this vigorous study, seventeen leading Irish artists, critics, and cultural commentators explore the neglected theme of Wilde's Irishness. Viewing Wilde from a range of unusual and arresting angles, the contributors assess what difference it makes to perceive him as Irish, or Anglo-Irish, rather than as a British writer.
The intention is to restore the author to his native context and to the rich and complicated cultural inheritance of an Irishman who spent much of his life in England. In its first section, the book presents a sequence of critical essays by such celebrated Irish writers, critics, and commentators as Derek Kiberd, Angela Bourke, Bernard O'Donoghue, and Fintan O'Toole. The second section aims to give some indication of the creative response to Wilde by some of Ireland's most gifted artists: among them, poets, playwrights, sculptors, a short story writer, and an actor. The book closes with Seamus Heaney's remarkable dedication of the Wilde window at Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey.
While the contributors to this volume reach a consensus about the essential Irishness of Wilde, they subvert the comfortable categories in which Wilde generally has been placed and highlight the difficulties of evaluating him within a cultural context. The book sets Wilde within the tradition of other formidable Irish writers, including Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, and Yeats—a tradition from which he has been previously excluded—and restores him to his rightful place as an Irish writer of rare, if not uncomplicated, distinction.
Contributors