"When his Past Challenges his Present and Looks into his Future: Defining Contemporary Biographical Novels about Oscar Wilde"

Joris, Kirby
(2011) 4th International BAAHE Conference: Facing Present, Past and Future — Location: University College Brussels (BE) (1.December.2011)

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  • Joris, KirbyUCLouvain
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Abstract
Biofiction’s increasing preoccupation with historical figures from the past has, in the last three decades, allowed scores of contemporary writers to express their own take on Oscar Wilde’s personal life. Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) undoubtedly marked the start of an eclectic and fervent series of biographical novels about Wilde’s trials and tribulations. Ackroyd’s book was followed by – among others – Russell A. Brown’s Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Friend of Oscar Wilde (1988), Rohase Piercy’s The Coward Does It with a Kiss (1990), C. Robert Holloway’s The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde (1997), Clare Elfman’s The Case of the Pederast’s Wife (2000) and Louis Edwards’s Oscar Wilde Discovers America (2003). Gyles Brandreth’s ongoing series entitled The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries (2007-) testifies to the enduring interest in Oscar Wilde as it is developed and strengthened in recent fiction. Other semi-fictional accounts that are not novels per se may also be mentioned, such as Merlin Holland’s Coffee with Oscar Wilde (2007) – a fictive interview between the decadent writer and a present-day journalist, or the Wilde section on the website Dialogus (http://www.dialogus2.org/). The variety and scope of these contemporary fictional depictions of a past life that has been time and again convincingly re-appropriated and reinterpreted challenge the notion that there is but one recorded History as opposed to multitudinous fanciful histories. Biographical novels about Wilde’s private story continually play with notions of truth-seeking and truth-telling in order to blur the distinction between past and present interpretations of the man who might have been Oscar Wilde. More interestingly perhaps, novels like Brandreth’s Murder Mysteries have typically set the ground for future idiosyncratic representations of Wilde’s life, for with each murder mystery published in the series (one per year) comes another facet of Oscar’s personality. ‘Who will Oscar Wilde be in Brandreth’s next novel?’ is most probably the first and foremost question readers of the series ask themselves. This interplay between past, present and future speculations has been explicitly foregrounded in, for instance, Holloway’s The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde, the novel being an exchange of letters between a fictionalised, late-twentieth-century novelist (Holloway) and ‘Oscar Wilde,’ who casually answers from the hereafter. Anxious to set the record straight, Holloway’s Oscar wishes to publish a revised version of his famous De Profundis, therefore securing his literary future and renown in the twenty-first century and beyond. The aim of this paper is to examine the distinctive narrative forms that prevail in biographical novels about Oscar Wilde and how they each manage to convey an image of the man that is revealing yet at the same time intrinsically enigmatic and non-definitive. In order to arrive at a definition of ‘Oscar Wilde Biofictions’ that is both accurate and open to new perspectives, this paper will consider the challenges offered by today’s fiction in providing various afterlives for Oscar Wilde that consciously blend past facts with present fancy and cannot but foster, as a result, additional future portrayals.
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Joris, K. (2011). “When his Past Challenges his Present and Looks into his Future: Defining Contemporary Biographical Novels about Oscar Wilde”. 4th International BAAHE Conference: Facing Present, Past and Future, University College Brussels (BE). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/89994