English - Free topic E: Gender and Wilde Victorian verse: Oscar Wilde and the Poetry of his Contemporaries

This elective course consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the writings of Oscar Wilde, while the second part hones in on some of Wilde’s most important near-contemporaries and how they shaped the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century poetry. The two parts are taught by Lene Østermark-Johansen and Charles Lock respectively.

Part 1: The Writings of Oscar Wilde (Lene Østermark-Johansen):

The general view of Oscar Wilde is that he was one of the wittiest dandies of the late nineteenth century, known for his epigrams, his comedies, and his charismatic public persona. This course aims to give students an introduction to the complexities of Wilde’s writing and his engagement with the literature both of the past and of fin-de-siècle Europe. We will study a broad range of Wilde’s writings: his poetry, his short fiction, his journalism, his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays and his autobiographical De Profundis, written while he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol. Issues such as hellenism, renaissance revival, new men and women, cosmopolitanism and the complex interrelationship between art and life will be discussed, as we position Wilde in a decadent European context which has plenty of resonance with issues of gender, identity, the relation of art in society which engage us today.

Part 2: Gender in / verse (Charles Lock):

A study of nineteenth century and early twentieth-century poetry by near-

contemporaries of Oscar Wilde. We will look at selected poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61), Robert Browning (1812-89), Walt Whitman (1819-92), Emily Dickinson (1830-86), Christina Rossetti (1830-94), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) and others. The emphasis will be on close reading, with attentiveness to gender: pronounswill not be ignored. Critical and theoretical texts will be used throughout.