Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde

• Chapter 1 Background: Wilde’s Social Circles and Consumer Culture; Chapter 2 Newspaper Culture in the Pall Mall Gazette Years (1884–1890); Chapter 3 The Woman’s World (1887–1889) as Fashion Magazine and Modernist Laboratory; Chapter 4 Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: The Aesthetics of Fashion in Baudelaire, Wilde, and Tomson/Watson; Chapter 5 Consumer Fashion and Modernist Aesthetics in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892); Chapter 6 Mrs. Erlynne as Modernist: The Artist of Consumer Image and Ritual; Conclusion;

"This book portrays playwright Wilde as a consumer modernist, working in the very heart of 1890s London's mass-culture industry." -- Columbia College Today, March/April 2008"...this excellent reinterpretation of Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic in relation to consumer and mass culture most definitely rejuvenates Wilde studies with a new trajectory of exploration not only for literary critics, but also for critics and researchers who study fashion, art and consumer culture from the purviews of economics, history, feminism, and sociology."-- Rocky Mountain Review, Fall 2008"I think that this book makes a good contribution to Wilde scholarship in general and is especially useful in examining Wilde's earlier writings."--English Literature in Transition, 2010