Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde (review)

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde Richard Allen Cave Philip E. Smith II, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde. Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Pp. xi + 278, illustrated. $19.75 (Pb). It is perhaps unfortunate that this excellent anthology of essays appears as part of a series entitled Approaches to Teaching, since that might incline the uninformed reader to suppose that the essays of the contributing authors are directed at those preparing undergraduate lectures. In one sense, of course, the book is so directed; but the essays are all by teaching scholars, who bring a prodigious range of research to the undertaking so that the volume overall is a wonderful demonstration and critique of where Wilde [End Page 425] studies are now situated. Despite its title, the anthology is a gift to the young post-graduate embarking on a thesis focused on Wilde, to the mature scholar looking for up-to-date perspectives on long-familiar works, and, I would argue, to the theatre practitioner (director, actor, designer) needing succinct insights into the social, political, and cultural backgrounds of the plays. To all such readers, the book offers not definitive answers but the information necessary to stimulating individual research. To describe the work as a brilliantly annotated and seemingly exhaustive bibliography of available research tools is not, I hope, disrespectful of any author’s contribution. Unlike a conventional bibliography, the “annotations” are contextualized within the essay format so that one understands immediately the occasion for the critique and the ideologies (scholarly and pedagogic) that frame the commentaries. Philip E. Smith, II, in his introduction, states that “there is no last word or single best approach” (23), and his authors have been careful to follow that directive, delighting in the multiform signifiers in Wilde’s works, his combative attitude to essentializing, and his determined but uniquely motivated embrace of the rigours of form, not for its restrictions but for its potential to release a writer into unexpected freedoms. The volume addresses all of Wilde’s works in fiction, poetry, criticism, and drama, but the sections on the plays have the most substantial place in the anthology: of the twenty-seven essays overall, six address the social comedies and a generous five discuss Salomé (despite careful editing, there are inevitably overlaps). These essays share a concern to define the plays’ creative background. The study of influences, conscious and unconscious, is notoriously difficult to handle with any degree of subtlety, but the pitfalls are avoided, here, by an underlying concern to explore Wilde’s creative (mis)use of cultural expression, which is what admits him, though a chiefly nineteenth-century playwright, to the annals of modern drama. (Given his games with styles, his shrewd, seriously camp balancing of tone on a knife-edge between adulation and critique, it is tempting to situate him even within postmodernism.) This anthology impressively demonstrates, too, the diversity of Wilde’s techniques of creative self-referencing, and the plays are shown to be particularly rich in such intertextuality. Though independent creations, the essays in the drama sections do steadily inter-relate and evolve to produce a larger-scale argument. Sos Eltis demonstrates how the dramaturgical techniques Wilde employs destabilize readers and spectators seeking “coherent and unambiguous” endings (101), often (and disturbingly) by exposing the divide between “inner character and outward appearance,” especially in his wittier psychological creations (104). Developing this approach, Melissa Knox argues for the importance of understanding Wilde’s private biography, the better to [End Page 426] detect the turmoil that underlies both the action and the confident identities that his characters project. The plays’ conscious fusion of melodramatic and modernist elements, the subject of Francesca Coppa’s essay, is seen as productive of this unrest, especially in the playwright’s negotiations with familiar theatrical tropes. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr carries this line of enquiry further by investigating how Wilde trains an audience simultaneously to laugh and “to recognise the social codes such laughter contains” (131). The multiple textures of Wilde’s plays make them, in Robert Preissle’s view, ideal subjects for comparative arts courses: Wilde’s dramaturgical techniques are...

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