At what point will we have heard enough about Oscar Wilde? When will Wilde just shut up? His fin de siècle Paterian renaissance should be over by now. But as we prepare to enter the second decade of the new millennium, the reevaluation of Wilde continues. Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture contributes to this as we consider reevaluations of the aesthete/martyr, beginning with the unfolding of the second decade of the new century after Wilde's death in 1900. Joseph Bristow has assembled a stellar volume of essays that explore a broad range of Wildeana. Bristow is one of the foremost Wilde scholars, and he has played a role as editor, scholar, and facilitator of the archival and colloquium interest (this volume is shaped by Bristow's “Wilde at 150” conference and his National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on the Wilde archive). Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture manages to speak to both the specialist and the generalist interested in Wilde. Voluptuous and voluminous, the volume contains not only twelve substantial essays but also a serious preface and extensive introduction by Bristow, as well as a lengthy chronology of the life and afterlife of Wilde to 2008.

Bristow begins his own work writing about the immediate afterlife of Wilde, focusing on the years surrounding and following Wilde's death. However, the first three formal essays concern “the making” and “the modern” during Wilde's actual lifetime. Chapter 1, Lucy McDiarmid's study of Irish dramatist Lady Gregory, features “table-talk.” McDiarmid calls Lady Gregory a “paradigmatic Irish conversationalist” and notes that “Wilde was in a different league altogether: he was a star of table-talk” (52, 56). Daniel Novak's incisive chapter on “Sexuality in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” follows. He asks, for the Victorians, “Does the photograph capture body, soul, identity, and/or sexuality?” He proceeds to apply this question to representations of Wilde in his literal and textual corpus (63). “As a negative body and a photographic body, Dorian Gray therefore is a model subject both for fiction and for photography. … Wilde's representation of the homosexual body is photographic precisely in its abstraction and spectrality” (66). “Wilde's typicality and that of his characters is always in the process of being made and remade, deployed and redeployed through a photographic aesthetic of abstraction, composition, and recomposition” (89). Erin Williams Hyman's chapter concerns a 1895 representation by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for the funfair booth of Montmartre dance-hall performer La Goulue that included both Oscar Wilde (the new criminal) and Felix Feneon (an anarchist). Williams Hyman notes the “slippage between aestheticism, anarchism, and sexual subversion” (98) and points out that the mainstream French press was as fierce on Wilde during his trials as the English.

Richard Kaye's chapter “Politics of Posthumous Sainthood” inaugurates the “afterlife” portion of the book, although the volume's construction seems less concerned about Wilde's actual death than living representations of the author throughout his ongoing period of visibility. Kaye argues that “Wilde's status as saint or martyr … helped to determine the writer's twentieth-century fortunes” and focuses on the aesthete's identification with St. Sebastian (111). He examines Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Octave Mirbeau, and Marcel Proust, usefully maintaining that “the Wilde who took hold of the imagination of others in the years after his death stood at the crossroads of … contrasting and intensely overdetermined conceptions of Decadent writing and aestheticism, dissident forms of sexuality, and martyrdom, in which traditional notions of Christian renunciation rubbed up against a disease-seeking psychological formulation” (113). While Kaye's work is an excellent contribution, surprisingly, he pays no attention to the substantial scholarship on Wilde and religion. Yvonne Ivory's rich historical chapter on Wilde in the German-speaking world is extraordinary, pointing out the irony of Wilde's derision of all things German versus German-speaking culture's interest in his life and works. If “Salome was at the heart of the Wilde revival in Germany” (137), and German interest in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) is well known, less familiar are the early translations of Wilde by transvestite Hermann Freiherr von Teschenberg, contributions to Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee under the pseudonym “Dorian Gray,” and Adolf Brand's avoidance of mention of Wilde in his almost mythologically Aryan homophile Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. Ivory concludes that the “reception of Wilde among Germans engaged in the early homosexual rights movement had little to do with his writings and everything to do with his biography. … Wilde not only meant different things to each group but also was treated very differently by each. … In the pages of [Hirschfeld’s] Jahrbuch, Wilde was often portrayed as a victim or as a martyr; the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen wanted an Ubermensch” (146).

Not surprisingly, the plays are the thing in this volume. Julie Townsend considers other versions of the Salome story as well as questions of the dance itself. Lizzie Thynne focuses on the early twentieth-century gender-bending artist Claude Cahun, who adopted and alluded to the Salome persona in her writing and photography (181). Laurel Brake makes excellent connections in placing Wilde's “Ideal Husband” (1895) next to Somerset Maugham's “Constant Wife” (1927). But the real drama gets going where Leslie Moran analyzes the truth of masks in the Wilde trials “literature,” namely, their representations. Moran explores both the fiction of H. Montgomery Hyde's early work, as well as Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland's more recent edition. Using the historical and legal impetus of 1960s filmmaking to demonstrate how “facts of the trials have … been manipulated by a whole series of interventions that heighten their effect” (250), Moran closes with the challenging statement that “Holland's description of his interventions during the course of transforming a shorthand transcript into a published volume … shows that [the boundary between facts and fictions] remains blurred, controversial, and perilous” (255).

The final three essays in the volume keep the focus on performance, from Francesca Coppa's thorough exploration of the character of Oscar Wilde (and his analogues) in modern drama and film, to Matt Cook's essay on Derek Jarman stating, “The ways Wilde was written in and out of Jarman's story of himself, his art, and his politics demonstrate what it was about [the 1980s and early 1990s] that made certain appropriations of Wilde possible and others much more problematic” (286), to Oliver Buckton's lovely study of cinematic representations of Wilde and his works. If we begin this long collection with the reaction of “not another book on Oscar Wilde,” by the end of reading it, one certainly feels that the legend lives on.