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scar Wilde, an Irish playwright educated at Oxford, found his greatest literary success in London and the West End, nevertheless, writing in French to the author and critic Edmond de Goncourt, Wilde claimed that he was, ‘Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare.’ Wilde’s Francophilia is well-known and well-attested in the scholarly work of Emily Eels, David Rose, Véronique Daviau and others. His one-act tragedy Salomé was written in French before being translated into English by his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Indeed, when the Lord Chamberlain refused its dramatic license, Wilde threatened to become a French citizen and, in the end, the play was first produced by Aurélien Lugné-Poe at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in 1896. References to French culture abound in Wilde’s poetry, plays, criticisms, and novel. In A Woman of No Importance, good Americans are said to ‘go to Paris’ when they die, and Dorian’s pivotal and poisonous book features a young Parisian who resembles Des Esseintes, the decadent protagonist of Huysmans’s A Rebours. Paris was almost a second home for Wilde, as he travelled there in the 1880s to work on his second playThe Duchess of Padua and to honeymoon with Constance; in the 1890s he visited with friends and young men. It was to Dieppe and Berneval in Normandy where Wilde retreated after his release from prison, and it was to Paris once again that he returned to spend his final days of exile. He is buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery beneath a tomb sculpted by Jacob Epstein and guarded from the attention of tourists by a glass barrier. We invite papers of 10-12 minutes that address Wilde’s works, life, influences, and connections to all things French.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 50-word bio by March 16th, 2025, to Aaron Eames.

This will be the second special session organised by the Oscar Wilde Society, which is based in London. For more information about the MLA conference, please visit https://www.mla.org/.


Created 25 February 2025