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WORK TITLE: Making Oscar Wilde
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PERSONAL
Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
EDUCATION:Concordia University, bachelor’s degree; Cambridge University–King’s College, M.Phil., Ph.D.; also attended University of Heidelberg as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellow.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Fulbright scholar and department associate in the English Department; taught at Edinburgh University, Boston University, Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, and Heidelberg University; then University of Oxford, Oxford, England, beginning 2009, associate professor of English literature, fellow of Mansfield College, and former deputy director of the Rothermere American Institute. Also Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Visiting Research Fellow at the Humanities Center of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 2009, and Eakin Visting Fellowship of Canadian Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, winter, 2018; series on the board of English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 and Canadian review of American Studies.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including The Nineteenth Century Child and Consumer Culture, edited by Dennis Denisoff, Ashgate, 2008; Henry James in Context, edited by David McWhirter, Cambridge University Press, 2010; Oscar Wilde in Context, edited by Kerry Powell and Peter Raby, Cambridge University Press, 2014; and Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern, edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Oxford University Press, 2016. Contributor to periodicals, including African American Review, the Guardian, Journal of American Studies, New York Times, and Victorian Literature and Culture.
SIDELIGHTS
Michèle Mendelssohn is an English literature professor whose primary areas of interest are British, American, and Canadian literature dating from the late nineteenth century onward. She has written about Victorian literature, twentieth-century cultural history and contemporary writing. Mendelssohn is recognized worldwide for her expertise connected with transatlantic literature, decadence, visual culture, race, gender and sexuality studies. Mendelssohn is a contributor to professional journals and popular periodicals.
Mendelssohn is also the author and editor of books. She is coeditor of and a contributor to Late Victorian Into Modern, which features essays concerning changes and continuity in culture from the late nineteenth century on into the early twentieth century. She is also coeditor of Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence, which focuses on the works of the English novelist, poet, short story writer, and translator.
Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture
Her first book, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, focuses on these nineteenth century authors’ influence upon each other and the importance of being “aesthetic” in the Victorian era. In examining the relationship between James and Wilde, Mendelssohn relates how their mutual antagonism reflects the cultural oppositions that exist within Aestheticism itself. The intellectual and art movement emphasized aesthetic values over social-political themes within the context of the arts.
Mendelssohn examines the transatlantic nature of Aestheticism via the two authors’ decades long relationship. and readings of their works and various other periodicals and rare manuscripts. In the process, she discusses the influences on both authors of visual and decorative arts and by various contemporary artists, from the Franco-British cartoonist and author George Du Maurier to the American artist James McNeill Whistler. Victorian Studies contributor Joseph Bristow remarked: “Mendelssohn sets out to reveal that much of the mutual antipathy between James and Wilde arose from misunderstandings. In effect, her purpose is to disclose that the nationalistic biases that we find in James’s and Wilde’s attacks on each other mask the fact that they maintained similar preoccupations about l’art pour l’art.”
Making Oscar Wilde
Making Oscar Wilde tells the story of Ocar Wilde’s life based on new archival information and rare documents. Wilde was an Irish eccentric who became a worldwide cultural icon. The impetus to write another biography of Wilde came to Mendelssohn after she made a discovery in a library archive of six small cards depicting Wilde as having different identies, including Chinese, French, German, black and white American, as well as his true Irish identity. As a result Mendelssohn set out “to solve the mystery of Wilde’s identity,” as she writes in Making Oscar Wilde.
A major focus is on “Wilde’s self-mythologization, reinvention, and rise to celebrity,” as noted by a Publishers Weekly contributor. Mendelssohn discusses Wilde’s youth living with his grandiose and eccentric parents and his college days, where he developed a reputation for his keen intellect and as a poet and writer. She also discusses his marriage and family life and his downfall that led him to be incarcerated. Much of the book reveals around the speaking tour Wilde embarked upon in the United States in 1882.
“Mendelssohn’s contribution to Wilde’s legacy is her fresh look at the American tour, providing social and cultural context that helps to explain the mystery of the disconcerting images,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that Making Oscar Wilde presents “much to ponder in Mendelssohn’s analysis.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Mendlssohn, Michele, Making Oscar Wilde, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of Making Oscar Wilde.
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2018, review of Making Oscar Wilde, p. 71.
Victorian Studies, autumn, 2009, Joseph Bristow review of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, p. 147.
ONLINE
Mansfield College website, https://www.mansfield.ox.ac.uk/ (June 27, 2018), author faculty profile.
University of Oxford website, http://www.ox.ac.uk/ (June 27, 2018), author faculty profile.
University of Oxford Faculty of English website, https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/ (June 27, 2018), author faculty profile.
Dr Michèle Mendelssohn
Associate Professor in English Literature; Deputy Director, Rothermere American Institute; Fellow of Mansfield College
About
Dr Mendelssohn's research ranges from the late 19th century to the present day and covers both sides of the Atlantic. It encompasses British, American and Canadian literature. She has published widely on Victorian literature, 20th century cultural history, and contemporary writing. She is internationally recognised for her expertise on transatlantic literature, decadence, visual culture, race, gender and sexuality studies.
Expertise
Oscar Wilde
Henry James
Victorians
American literature
Decadence
Popular culture
Gender and sexuality
Selected publications
Making Oscar Wilde (2018)
Late Victorian into Modern (2016)
Alan Hollingshurst: Writing Under the Influence (2016)
Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (2014, 2007)
Media experience
Dr Mendelssohn has experience of working with UK and international media.
Recent media work
BBC Radio 4 - Love Henry James: The Master
How Oscar Wilde’s life imitates his art
Slate's Double X Gabfest Podcast
Henry James Thought Oscar Wilde Was a Talentless Self-Promoter. Here's What Happened When The Two Met
Languages
English, French, German
CONTACT INFORMATION
01865 282885
michele.mendelssohn@ell.ox.ac.uk
@TheYoungOscar
Dr Michèle Mendelssohn
Michele Mendelssohn
Associate Professor & Tutorial Fellow, Mansfield College
michele.mendelssohn@ell.ox.ac.uk
Mansfield College
Victorian Period Modern and Contemporary
American Literature
Masters supervision DPhil supervision
Permanent Academic Staff
Research
Teaching & Academic Citizenship
About
My research ranges from the late 19th century to the present day and covers both sides of the Atlantic: I am passionate about British and American literature and cultural history, as well as contemporary Canadian writing. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth Century Literature, African American Review, Journal of American Studies and elsewhere. Until recently, I was Deputy Director of the Rothermere American Institute, where I led academic programming and contributed to the Institute's management. During winter 2018, I will hold the Eakin Visting Fellowship in Canadian Studies at McGill University.
My biography of Oscar Wilde will be published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Based on new evidence, Making Oscar Wilde tells the story of a local Irish eccentric called Oscar who became a global cultural icon called Wilde. Set on two continents, the book is a cultural history of sensation-hungry Victorian journalism and popular entertainment alongside racial controversies, sex scandals, and the rising power of Irish nationalism in the United States.
To celebrate Wilde's 163rd birthday, I wrote a piece about him. You can it read here.
My first book, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, shows how two of the 19th century's foremost authors profoundly influenced each other and shaped the period's literary and visual culture. The book explores why being 'aesthetic' mattered so much to Victorians on both sides of the sea. It also explains how Aestheticism responded to anxieties about culture, originality, sexuality and nationality.
With Laura Marcus and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, I co-edited Late Victorian Into Modern, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Featuring new essays by 40 leading scholars, the book reveals the cultural continuties and ruptures that occurred between the end of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th. My chapter examines why cosmopolitanism mattered to John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Joris-Karl Huysmans in the Victorian era, and why it still felt vital to E. M. Forster on the eve of World War 1.
Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence (co-edited with Denis Flannery) developed from my longstanding interest in gay history and visual culture. This is the first collection to consider the majority of Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning works -- from his poetry and novels, to his criticism and French translation.
Thanks to Yale University's Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature, I recently completed a major reassessment of two young Harlem Renaissance writers who infused African-American literature with European decadent culture. I presented my findings on Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman's daring, precocious work in a British Library keynote lecture (soon to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press).
I am currently working on cultures of cosmopolitanism in Canada.
Selected publications
'A Decadent Dream Deferred: the Harlem Renaissance's Queer Modernity' Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Eds. Kate Hext and Alex Murray (Johns Hopkins University Press, in press).
'Reading Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism and Decadence.' Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern. Eds. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Oxford UP, 2016).
'Poetry, Parody, Porn and Prose' Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the Influence. Eds. Michèle Mendelssohn and Denis Flannery (Manchester UP, 2016).
'Rewriting the Genealogy of Minstrelsy for Modernity: "Cry and Sing, Walk and Rage, Scream and Dance"' African American Review (Spring 2015)
'Oscar Wilde, Henry James and the Fate of Aestheticism.' Oscar Wilde in Context. Eds. Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge UP, 2014)
'Beautiful Souls Mixed up with Hooked Noses: Art, Degeneration and Anti-Semitism in Trilby and The Master.' Victorian Literature and Culture 40.1 (March 2012): 179-197.
'Notes on Oscar Wilde's Transatlantic Gender Politics.' Journal of American Studies 46.1 (February 2012):1-15.
'Aestheticism and Decadence.' Henry James in Context. Ed. David McWhirter (Cambridge UP, 2010): 93-104.
'I'm not a bit expensive': Henry James and the Sexualization of the Victorian Girl.' The Nineteenth Century Child and Consumer Culture. Ed. Dennis Denisoff (Ashgate, 2008)
Publications
Homosociality and the Aesthetic in James’s Roderick Hudson
Journal article
Poetry, parody, porn and prose
Chapter
Reading Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism and Decadence
2016 | Chapter
Late Victorian into Modern
2016 | Book
Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence
2016 | Book
Rewriting the Genealogy of Minstrelsy for Modernity: “Cry and Sing, Walk and Rage, Scream and Dance”
2015 | Journal article
Oscar Wilde, Henry James and the Fate of Aestheticism
2013 | Chapter
Beautiful souls mixed up with hooked noses: Art, degeneration, and anti-semitism in the master and trilby
2012 | Journal article
Notes on Oscar Wilde's transatlantic gender politics
2012 | Journal article
Aestheticism and Decadence
2010 | Chapter
The Tragic Muse
2009 | Chapter
The Tragic Muse
2009 | Chapter
‘I’m not a bit expensive’: Henry James and the Sexualization of the Victorian Girl
2008 | Chapter
'Revaluing and Re-Evaluating Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde' [An assessment commissioned by THE OSCHOLARS to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication]
2007 | Internet publication
Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture
2007 | Book
Ticket to Rye: a Visit to Henry James's House
2004 | Journal article
Oscar Wilde
2004 | Chapter
Reconsidering race, Language and Identity in The Emperor Jones
1999 | Journal article
Michèle Mendelssohn was born and raised in Montréal, Canada. After completing a first degree in English Literature and Liberal Arts at Concordia University, she spent a year doing research in German and American literature at the University of Heidelberg as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellow. Michèle completed her M.Phil. (First) and Ph.D. at Cambridge University (King’s College). She was also a Fulbright Scholar and Departmental Associate in the English Department at Harvard University. Prior to joining Oxford’s English Faculty in 2009, she taught at Edinburgh University, Boston University, Harvard, Cambridge, and Heidelberg. In 2009, she was Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Visiting Research Fellow at the Humanities Center of the University of Utah. In 2010 and 2011, she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and a short-term Research Fellowship in African American History and Culture at Emory University. She is on the board of English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 and Canadian Review of American Studies. She reviews for Modernism/ modernity, Henry James Review, Victorian Review, Review of English Studies, and others. In addition to her scholarly work, she has written for The New York Times and The Guardian, and been interviewed in The Scotsman, as well as on CBC radio. She is convenor of the Victorian period group, and co-convenor of the American Literature Research Seminar. She is co-organising the Alain Locke in the 21st Century Symposium on 12-13 October 2012.
Period/ Subject: Late 19th & Early 20th Century British and American Literature Research and Teaching Interests:
Late 19th and early 20th century British and American literature
Transatlantic studies
International Decadence
Visual and material culture
"Race" studies
Gender and sexuality studies
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Print Marked Items
Mendelssohn, Michele: MAKING
OSCAR WILDE
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Mendelssohn, Michele MAKING OSCAR WILDE Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 7, 1 ISBN:
978-0-19-880236-5
A fresh look at Oscar Wilde's English, Irish, and American contexts.
As "gay history's Christ figure," Wilde (1854-1900) has been amply investigated by biographers and literary
historians, but Mendelssohn (English/Oxford Univ.; Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture,
2007, etc.) was surprised by a discovery she made in a library archive: six small cards, each depicting Wilde
with a different ethnicity: Irish, Chinese, French, German, black, and white American. In addition, she
found a Currier and Ives poster of Wilde with brown skin, thick lips, and "spiky Afro hair." The provocative
images, she writes, inspired her quest "to solve the mystery of Wilde's identity." Although she claims that
her research reveals a "secret life" unknown to previous writers, in fact much of Mendelssohn's entertaining
study conveys a familiar portrait of the ambitious aesthete: his "larger-than-life parents," Sir William, a
renowned oculist, and his eccentric wife, Jane; Wilde's experiences at Oxford, where he hosted "exotic"
soirees in his college rooms and won honors for his intellectual prowess; his literary reputation as a poet
and playwright; his exhausting American tour; marriage and fatherhood; and his precipitous downfall,
which led to incarceration in Reading Gaol. Mendelssohn's contribution to Wilde's legacy is her fresh look
at the American tour, providing social and cultural context that helps to explain the mystery of the
disconcerting images. In 1882, Wilde disembarked in New York into a swirling eddy of assumptions about
race, class, and gender. The foppish 27-year-old generated curiosity--sometimes cruel--about his manliness.
His lectures, which at first were "painful," the New York Times reported, invited parodies. His unscrupulous
manager promoted him as if he were one of P.T. Barnum's freaks, and the press mounted "degrading
attacks," such as caricaturing him as "Mr Wild of Borneo," an image of Wilde as "a negrified Paddy."
Blackface minstrelsy, a hugely popular form of entertainment, lampooned him. The Currier and Ives poster,
Mendelssohn concludes, reflected the inseparable connection of "Negrophobia and Celtophobia" in 19thcentury
America.
A familiar biography embedded in a lively cultural history.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Mendelssohn, Michele: MAKING OSCAR WILDE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536570946/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8e6d67a9.
Accessed 4 June 2018.
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Making Oscar Wilde
Publishers Weekly.
265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p71.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Making Oscar Wilde
Michele Mendelssohn. Oxford Univ., $24.95
(304p) ISBN 978-0-198-80236-5
Mendelssohn (Henry James), a professor of English at Oxford, peripatetically, and not quite satisfyingly,
reexamines Oscar Wilde's self-mythologization, reinvention, and rise to celebrity, mostly in terms of Wilde's
1882 speaking tour of the United States. Straining to broaden the focus from Wilde's own career to a larger
cultural context, Mendelssohn emphasizes how the author was caught up in the racial, ethnic, and class
anxieties roiling a post-Civil War America full of newly arrived immigrants, many from Wilde's native
Ireland. After describing Wilde's early life and university career, the book shifts focus to the then-littleknown
27-year-old Wilde's time crisscrossing the U.S. talking about the Aesthetic art movement that he so
flamboyantly represented. Though Wilde would paint the tour as a success, in fact he often found himself
the subject of mockery and hostile scrutiny. Mendelssohn argues that Wilde nevertheless learned twin
lessons in perseverance and showmanship that served him in good stead in writing the plays that would
subsequently secure his fame. Mendelssohn's study never quite settles, as it tries to meld biography with an
expansive cultural history filtered through the lens of Wilde's visit and interactions. Nonetheless, there is
much to ponder in Mendelssohn's analysis, whether one agrees with it or not, and it will hopefully inform
future discussions of Wilde. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Making Oscar Wilde." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 71. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839810/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=07644947.
Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839810
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Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic
Culture
Joseph Bristow
Victorian Studies.
51.1 (Autumn 2008): p147+.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/pages.php?pID=96&CDpath=4
Full Text:
Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, by Michele Mendelssohn; pp. xvi + 310. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 65.00 [pounds sterling], $130.00.
In his April 1904 Quarterly Review article on Gabriele D'Annunzio's recently translated works, Henry
James reflects on the manner in which modern culture had not so long ago been "roused, as from some deep
drugged sleep, to the conception of the 'esthetic' law of life." From James's jaded perspective, the
excitement that surrounded the belief in "beauty at any price" eventually resulted in a "spectacle" that
proved "strange and finally ... wearisome" because it was "manipulated by as many different kinds of
inexpertness as probably ever huddled together on a single pretext." Unsuited to the English climate, the
outgrowths of I 'art pour l art--"a queer high-flavoured fruit from overseas, grown under another sun than
ours"--struck James as never "thoroughly digestible." While James's circumlocutions would never be so
vulgar as to state that British society became nauseous at the foreign body that was aestheticism, this is
pretty much what he means. Moreover, the figure who made this alien "spectacle" particularly sickening
was Oscar Wilde, whose notoriety for espousing the "'esthetic' law of life" had been known to James in the
early 1880s through mutual Boston Brahmin acquaintances such as Julia Ward Howe.
A year later, during his lecture tour of America, James showed no hesitation in expressing his distaste for
Wilde by alluding to his somewhat younger contemporary--who ten years before had been sentenced to two
years in jail for committing acts of "gross indecency"--as "one of those Irish adventurers who had
something of the Roman character--able but false." Such condescension, no matter how much it may have
been a symptom of pandering to the prejudices of his audience, looks very poorly judged, and it
concentrates attention on what scholars have generally agreed was James's longstanding unease with the
various guises that Wilde inhabited throughout a twenty-five-year career--professor of aesthetics, mocking
dandy, and (by the time the trials of 1895 sent him to prison) humiliated homosexual.
Part of Michele Mendelssohn's exploration of the vexed relations between James and Wilde is to dispel the
conventional perception that the two men occupied antithetical standpoints on the culture of aestheticism. In
particular, she aims to challenge the influential belief that the closeted James was aghast at the sexually
insubordinate Wilde. Mendelssohn disputes Richard Ellmann's contention in Oscar Wilde (1988) that
"James saw in Wilde a threat." Ellmann suggests that from the moment James denounced "Hosscar" as a
"fatuous fool" in the early 1880s, the source of the American novelist's antipathy was clear: "James's
homosexuality was latent," Ellmann asserts, while Wilde's was "patent" (Ellmann 179). As Mendelssohn
sees it, critics such as Jonathan Freedman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Hugh Stevens have erroneously
built on Ellmann's work by maintaining that "homosexual panic" and "homosexual self-loathing" lie at the
core of James's revulsion toward Wilde. Instead, Mendelssohn wishes to establish a more balanced
approach not only to James's dislike of "Hosscar" but also to Wilde's repulsion from his American
antagonist. Wilde, after all, thought James belonged to a tiresome literary school that was "the result of the
Realism of Paris filtered through the refining influence of Boston." Once it crossed the Atlantic, realism
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such as James's could only "play ... very cleverly upon one string" (Collected Works, ed. Robert Ross
[Methuen, 1908], XIII 261).
Bearing these conflicts in mind, Mendelssohn sets out to reveal that much of the mutual antipathy between
James and Wilde arose from misunderstandings. In effect, her purpose is to disclose that the nationalistic
biases that we find in James's and Wilde's attacks on each other mask the fact that they maintained similar
preoccupations about l'art pour l'art, as the juxtaposition of their contemporaneous novels The Tragic Muse
(1890) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) readily shows.
In principle, Mendelssohn is in an excellent position to act as an authoritative guide for readers who wish to
know much more about James's and Wilde's concurrent forays into debates about art that existed purely for
its own sake. Her skills as a researcher are tremendously impressive, and her acquaintance with the wealth
of sources that relates to these much studied authors is exceptionally strong. Perhaps the most convincing
chapter is the opening one where Mendelssohn examines the abundant satires that late Victorians aimed at
both James's and Wilde's aestheticism. Mendelssohn expands her discussion to show that there are striking
resemblances between George Du Maurier's fun-poking depictions of Wilde in Punch during the early
1880s and his illustrations of aesthetic types for James's Washington Square (1880) in the Cornhill
Magazine.
Yet it soon becomes clear that Mendelssohn's insistence on forging previously unrecognized links between
James and Wilde has a tendency to test one's credulity. At the end of her second chapter, for example, she
declares that "Wilde's relationship to Henry James ... may be encapsulated in the observation that Dorian
[Gray] is influenced by a man named Henry and almost murdered by another named James" (158). She
reaches this conclusion by attempting to show that in Dorian Gray the manipulative Lord Henry Wotton
embodies the "vivisecting" habits that Wilde abhorred (as he makes clear in "The Decay of Lying" [1891])
in Jamesian realism; to Wilde, James counts among those whose fiction looks on the "tedious document
humain" impersonally through a "microscope" (Collected Works VIII 8). Even if this kind of comparison
might plausibly suggest that the "Henry" in Lord Henry Wotton refers obliquely to Henry James, it remains
unclear how Wilde's other character, the homicidal James Vane, has any bearing on the American author.
By the end of her study, too many of Mendelssohn's claims appear overstated. The greatest strain in the
argument occurs when she focuses on James's and Wilde's apparently comparable interests in the figure of
the child. Since James not infrequently regarded Wilde as childish, it follows for Mendelssohn that "The
Turn of the Screw" (1898) "dramatically enacts aspects of James's response to Wilde" (254). As her reading
of James's famous narrative unfolds, she goes on to assert that, "like James's five-day wonder at Wilde's
performance at the opening of Lady Windermere's Fan"--when Wilde appeared on stage, smoking a
cigarette, and thanked the audience for thinking almost as highly of his play as he did-the governess in
James's story also "falls 'under the spell"' (255). In the end, one is left with the sense that Henry James,
Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture needed a more disciplined structure to make better sense of its
discoveries.
JOSEPH BRISTOW
University of California, Los Angeles
Bristow, Joseph
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bristow, Joseph. "Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture." Victorian Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2008,
p. 147+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A195012949/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fa742455. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A195012949
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