Between fingerprints and red herrings
(2013)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Latré, Guido
- Abstract
- (en) This Ph.D. investigates how Oscar Wilde’s life has been re-appropriated in recent fiction, more particularly in nine first-person biographical novels: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (Peter Ackroyd, 1983), The Coward Does It with a Kiss (Rohase Piercy, 1990), The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde (C. Robert Holloway, 1997), The Case of the Pederast’s Wife (Clare Elfman, 2000) and the first five The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries (Gyles Brandreth, 2007-present). This doctoral thesis situates itself within a largely unexplored area of literature, for while much has been written on biofiction from a theoretical point of view, this has not been the case for its relationship to metaphysical detective stories, which forms the touchstone of this study. The two main concepts on which this research hinges – i.e. biofiction and metaphysical detective stories – are first broached in the theoretical introduction, entitled “Preliminary Investigation. Recent Biofiction and Its (Dis)Contents.” The first part underscores that ‘biofiction’ as a relatively recent genre knows all kinds of alternative denominations that are as varied and contradictory as the depictions of Oscar Wilde in contemporary biofictions. It also explains its favouring of the term ‘biographical novel’ for the analysis and then switches to a more thematic approach, i.e. the link between such novels and metaphysical detective stories. The choice of Oscar Wilde as the privileged subject-suspect in such postmodern-postmortem representatives of life writing is then introduced as a set of hypotheses to be developed in the following steps of my own subversive metaphysical detective inquest. The historical basis of the novels actually stands at the centre of each chapter, all the while highlighting that the fictional elements allow for a renewed interest in Wilde that borders on admiration and/or obsession. This doctoral research project shows that the narratives selected for close analysis not only allow for an intimate re-acquaintance with Oscar Wilde according to the multifarious angles developed in the stories but also that the very nature of this re-acquaintance can only be fragmented, either because it is memory-bound or because of the very medium narrators make use of in the novels, i.e. writing. The concept of ‘metaphysical detective story’ is therefore the guiding principle and the principal lead in this inquest into Oscar Wilde’s private life. This doctoral study is structured according to the different steps of a detective investigation, not only because the postmodern subversive aspect of the novels lends itself to a rethinking of detective fiction as it is foregrounded in metaphysical detective stories, but also because the different aspects of any inquest as one may understand it accommodate the novels in a most peculiar way, each narrative broaching in its own individual way specific parallelisms between the fin de siècle and postmodernism, but also between traditionally successful investigations and a more topical questioning of identity and promoting of open endings, i.e. of cases that can never be closed or run cold. The narrator-investigators in the novels all proceed from a different modus operandi, which is reflected in the titles given to the chapters: "Chapter 1: Profiling the Suspect"; "Chapter 2: Tailing the Missing Person"; "Chapter 3: Interrogating the Suspect"; "Chapter 4: Witness Statements"; "Chapter 5: Confessions." The conclusion of this doctoral study is named “Trial(s), Judgment, Closure?.” It brings together all the evidence displayed in the corpus as would be the case in court and cross-examines as well as confronts the analyses of the novels to the notion of ‘biofictional metaphysical detective story.’
- Affiliations
Citations
Joris, K. (2013). Between fingerprints and red herrings. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/163681