Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle

Deaglán Ó Donghaile is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. His first book, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism was published by EUP in 2011. His research focuses on the relationship between literature, political culture and violence in late nineteenth and early twentieth century writing.

• Series Editor’s PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Wilde and Politics1. Anticolonial Wilde2. Coercion and Resistance: Vera … or the Land War3. Class, Criticism, and Culture: ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’4. Fairy Tales for Revolutionaries5. The Politics of Art and The Picture of Dorian Gray6. Civil Disobedience and The Importance of Being Earnest7. ‘De Profundis’, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and the Politics of Imprisonment8. Oscar Wilde - The Lost Revolutionary?BibliographyIndex

...in　Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle, Deaglán Ó Donghaile provides the most extensive re-reading yet of Wilde as consistently ‘radical throughout his entire oeuvre’, in which he is represented as (both openly and in coded form) expressing intellectual solidarity with a range of left-wing thinkers, activists and ideas. Ó Donghaile works his way through Wilde’s life and work, moving from the American lecture tour at the start of his career to his prison writing,　De Profundis　(1905) and　The Ballad of Reading Gaol　(1898), and provides provocative and stimulating analysis of an extensive range of material. I want to particularly single out the brilliant (and mostly convincing) reading of his early and very neglected (and, to my mind, underrated play)　Vera, or The Nihilists　(1883) as an anticolonial intervention into Irish land politics. One of the most impressive aspects of this book is the way in which Ó Donghaile connects Wilde to an extraordinary range of left-wing thinkers, arguing that even if Wilde has been much misunderstood politically, his ideological commitments were obvious to those with whom he shared a set of beliefs. Ó Donghaile provides the most persuasive argument for seeing Wilde as a coherently progressive thinker and writer with an overarching political philosophy that informed almost everything he wrote....　this is a provocative and challenging reading of Wilde’s writings that can be highly recommended