Oscar Wilde in Vienna: Pleasing and Teasing the Audience

Sandra Mayer, author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna, argues it was his
willingness to both please and tease his audience. His plays
skilfully manoeuvre between conformism and subversion,
conventionality and innovation. Her new book investigates the
dynamic interplay of literary work, theatre and audience, and is
centrally concerned with the question of ‘what makes a classic?’
What has led to a century of almost uninterrupted performance on
the Viennese stage of the works of Victorian Britain’s most
controversial playwright? It also asks, what are the factors that
transform a theatrical novelty into a time-honoured repertory
highlight that may be reworked from different aesthetic and
ideological perspectives? What makes (or breaks) a work’s canonical
endurance? What does the translation and staging of a play tell us
about Austrian culture? In this first book-length study in English
of the reception of Oscar Wilde’s works in the German-speaking
world, Oscar Wilde in Vienna charts the plays’ history on Viennese
stages between 1903 and 2013. It casts a spotlight on the
international reputation of one of the most popular
English-language writers while contributing to Austrian cultural
history in the long twentieth century. Drawing on extensive
archival material, the book examines the appropriation of Wilde's
plays against the background of political crises and social
transformations. It unravels the mechanisms of cultural transfer
and canonisation within an environment positioned - like Wilde
himself - at the crossroads of centre and periphery, tradition and
modernity. Dr Sandra Mayer is a literary and cultural historian
whose research interests include literary celebrity and authorship,
cultural transfer and reception, literary networks and
cosmopolitanism, and the literature and culture of the Victorian
Age. Having received her doctorate from the University of Vienna,
Sandra has since worked as a researcher and lecturer in Oxford,
Vienna and Zurich. Her previous work has focused on Benjamin
Disraeli as a celebrity and she has co-edited books on Irish drama.
She is currently Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow at the University
of Vienna, in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing
at Wolfson College, Oxford, working on the Art and Action: Literary
Celebrity and Politics project. A joint event hosted by the Theatre
Studies and Queer Studies Networks. Sandra will be joined by an
expert panel to discuss the book and its themes: Professor Mary
Luckhurst (Head of the School of Arts, University of Bristol),
Professor Dominic Janes (Professor of Modern History, Keele
University), Chaired by Dr Stefano Evangelista (Associate Professor
of English Literature, University of Oxford)