Making Oscar Wilde

A Book at Lunchtime seminar with Michele Mendelssohn, literary
critic and cultural historian. Dr Sos Eltis (Brasenose, Oxford), Dr
Charles Foster (Green Templeton, Oxford), Chaired by Professor Dame
Hermione Lee (Wolfson, Oxford). Witty, inspiring, and charismatic,
Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his
plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not
always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life
denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young
Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set
on two continents, it tracks a larger-than-life hero on an
unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international
acclaim. 'Success is a science,' Wilde believed, 'if you have the
conditions, you get the result.' Combining new evidence and
gripping cultural history, Michele Mendelssohn dramatizes Wilde's
rise, fall, and resurrection as part of a spectacular transatlantic
pageant. With superb style and an instinct for story-telling, she
brings to life the charming young Irishman who set out to captivate
the United States and Britain with his words and ended up
conquering the world. Following the twists and turns of Wilde's
journey, Mendelssohn vividly depicts sensation-hungry Victorian
journalism and popular entertainment alongside racial
controversies, sex scandals, and the growth of Irish nationalism.
This ground-breaking revisionist history shows how Wilde's
tumultuous early life embodies the story of the Victorian era as it
tottered towards modernity. Riveting and original, Making Oscar
Wilde is a masterful account of a life like no other. About the
Author Michele Mendelssohn is a literary critic and cultural
historian. She is Associate Professor of English Literature at
Mansfield College, Oxford. She earned her doctorate from Cambridge
University and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. Her
previous books include Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic
Culture and two co-edited collections of literary criticism, Alan
Hollinghurst and Late Victorian Into Modern (shortlisted for the
2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize). She has published
in The New York Times, The Guardian, African American Review,
Journal of American Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and
Victorian Literature and Culture. She is joined by Dr Sos Eltis
(Brasenose, Oxford), Dr Charles Foster (Green Templeton, Oxford),
Chaired by Professor Dame Hermione Lee (Wolfson, Oxford).