Event overview
A British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS) talk from Dr Kate Hext (University of Exeter)
Had he lived, Oscar Wilde would have gone to Hollywood. He always loved the glitz of America, and lucrative contracts for scenario writers in the Hollywood boom from 1915 would quite possibly have offered an irresistible income. In reality, of course, Oscar never made it to the Dream Factories of LA. However, his stories did. This paper traces how and why his 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, became a popular and subversive text for film adaptations in Hollywood between 1915 and 1945. It explores the cultural capital and cache of Wilde in the US in this period and argues that the films use this as a mask, behind which they dare to gesture beyond the strict confines of censorship to the unshowable and unsayable.
*This paper uses clips from the films in question and prior knowledge of them is not necessary.
Dr Kate Hext is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. Most recently she has published articles, or has articles forthcoming, on the origins of Camp (in Modernism /modernity, 2019), ‘hard-boiled’ Decadence in 1920s America (in Modernist Cultures, 2018), Henry James’ short fiction (in the Henry James Review), the concept of the sublime at the fin de siècle (in Decadence and Romanticism, Routledge, 2016), and Oscar Wilde and Heraclitus (Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity, OUP, 2017). She is co-editor, with Alex Murray, of Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) and is completing a monograph on how the Decadent Movement influenced Hollywood between the 1910s and 1950s.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Mar 2019 | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
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