SEMINAR DESCRIPTION

The proposed five-week Summer Seminar titled “The Oscar Wilde Archive: His Life, His Work, His Legend” will take place from June 25, 2007 to July 27, 2007. The seminar aims to introduce fifteen participants to a broad selection of printed and unpublished sources held in one of the three principal collections belonging to the William Andrews Clark Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. The Clark Library’s archive dedicated to the life and works of Oscar Wilde and his circle is the largest of its kind in the world, and it provides an excellent resource for enabling seminar participants to understand how the holdings of a major rare book library can enhance their knowledge of the achievements of a major writer of legendary repute whose works are very widely taught on humanities syllabi. In particular, the seminar offers those colleagues who have not had the opportunity to make use of archival sources so far in their careers to assess how manuscripts, typescripts, and other unpublished materials (especially items of correspondence) can throw light on Wilde’s diverse oeuvre—which includes fiction, poetry, drama, critical essays, and journalism. The assigned readings cover key moments in Wilde’s twenty-five year career—all the way from his time as a budding poet and aesthete at Oxford University in the mid-1870s to his period of impoverished exile after his release from his two-year sentence in the spring of 1897 (the year when he started work on his polemic in support of prison reform, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)). Since the Clark Library holds each and every primary and full-length secondary source relating to Wilde’s productive professional life, it will be possible for participants to acquire informed insights into how and why this distinguished Irish author remains the focus of much advanced research in the humanities.