Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
1 total work
Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen, and Male Desire explores Wilde's idea of 'male procreation', which is the begetting of new ideas through the erotic but not necessarily physical interactions of male couples. The study offers innovative readings of several of Wilde's texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome. The author connects Wilde to Wilfred Owen through two figures: Robert Ross, Wilde's first lover and literary executor; and Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, the translator of Proust and the person who most directly placed Owen into Wilde's tradition of male procreation. The book seeks to take Wilde seriously as a theorist of same-sex love while allowing for the differences between Wilde's classically based conceptions and those of the twentieth century. Likewise, it situates Owen as Wilde's symbolic son, as both a product of Wilde's theory and as a proponent of it.