![]() ![]() The shelf of Wilde biographies is long and, on the whole, unsatisfactory. The play is Wilde’s masterpiece, the most sublime stage farce ever written but Trilling put it correctly: it is the figure of Wilde which commands our attention, and we are apt to depend on Wilde’s biographers in a way that we do not in the case of the other writers on Harold Bloom’s list. ![]() ![]() His rehabilitation has been all the more remarkable in that among his works only The Importance of Being Earnest still has currency. Dismissed by the first generation of literary modernists as a relic of the Yellow 90’s, Wilde has since been proclaimed the patron saint of Camp by Susan Sontag and identified as an early, brilliant avatar of the “therapeutic” by Philip Rieff. “With each passing year the figure of Wilde becomes clearer and larger,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972, not going quite so far as Harold Bloom, who recently included Wilde on his short list of writers who will be crucial to postmodern culture, the others being Emerson, Nietzsche, Pater, and Freud. In recent decades Oscar Wilde has enjoyed a run on the intellectual exchange like no other Victorian. ![]()
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