he Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans, LA, January 9-12, 2025
Known predominantly as a wit, playwright, aesthete, and social commentator, it can be easy to forget that Oscar Wilde also wrote a number of gothic works and stories that draw from gothic themes. His only full-length novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has a supernatural conceit of an uncanny portrait that keeps its owner young while it deteriorates and displays the sins of its subject, his short story "Lord Arthur Saville's Crime" is a tale of self-fulfilling prophecy brought on with an encounter with a chiromantist who entertains the aristocracy with a taste of the occult art of palmistry, and "The Canterville Ghost" is a comic reimagining of a gothic ghost story in which he pokes fun at American Anglophilia. Beyond these more obvious connections, even when not writing a fully-gothic tale, Wilde Also made use of common gothic motifs in his popular plays, essays, and fairy tales including gentlemen poisoners, forged identities, fallen women, dark secrets, social decay, beautiful suicides, and forbidden desires. Additionally, interesting connections might be made in the manner he wrote about Romanticism and human nature to gothic themes, as well as the ways in which Wilde, as a cultural icon with an "afterlife" of his own, continues to "haunt" his modern day audience through the constant adaptation of his works and life in various media.
This will be the second special session organised by the Oscar Wilde Society, which is based in London.
Papers might address such topics as:
- Wilde's relationship to Spiritualism and the occult
- Wilde's opinions and reviews on gothic writers
- Gothic writers as influences on Wilde
- Wilde's reading including Melmoth the Wanderer and Sidonia the Sorceress
- Supernatural and occult elements in Wilde's writing
- Death, poison, and murder in Wilde's writing
- Relationships with Romanticism
- Monstrous natures in Wilde's characters
- Mystery and secrets in Wilde's writing
- Chiromancy and physiognomy
- Curses, prophesy, and fate in Wilde's narratives
- Gothic themes in Wilde's poetry
- "The Canterville Ghost" and Gothic parody
- Adaptations and reimaginings of The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Visualising Wilde's Gothic imagination, illustration and film
- Neo-Gothic adaptations of Wilde's writing
- Occult attempts to contact Wilde from beyond the grave
Please submit a 300 word abstract and a short bio by March 16, 2024, to Sandra M. Leonard at sleonard@kutztown.edu.
For more information about the MLA conference, please visit https://www.mla.org/.
Created 29 February 2024