![]() ![]() Engagingly written, scholarly, and original, the book puts forward an unfamiliar narrative of historical continuity between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories of male homosexuality, as well as presenting readers with an extensive and exciting archive of images. Janes is particularly good at navigating the intricate and overlapping fields of effeminacy, homoeroticism, and sodomy, and rethinking the relationship between them. But here, Wilde is convincingly presented as the end point of a tradition. There has been a lot of scholarly work on Wilde as the ‘first’ publicly gay man, in that he set the standard for literary and iconographic representations of homosexual men in the twentieth century. In so doing, it convincingly refutes the argument-prevalent among post-Foucauldian critics-that male homosexuality only gained public visibility in the late nineteenth century. “Drawing on the genre of caricature, Oscar Wilde Prefigured discovers a continuous but varied tradition of representations of sodomy and effeminacy. Read More about Oscar Wilde Prefigured Read Less about Oscar Wilde Prefigured Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. In the 1997 film Wilde, the portrayal of the psychological and emotional stress that Oscar Wilde is put under during his exploration of his homosexual feelings. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (22 October 1870 20 March 1945), also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury’s horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. “I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad,” Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom-which erupted in laughter-accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite.
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