"The Cult(-ure) of Oscar Revisited: Rebirth of Wilde in Contemporary Biographical Fictions"

World-famous Oscar Wilde continues to play a substantial part in a significant body of contemporary fictions. As it is, reconstructing Oscar through the means of fiction has proved a most popular enterprise for the last twenty-five years. It appears that today’s writers are not only keen on learning about/from the man Oscar and the author Wilde but equally on staging him in a profusion of mise-en-abyme-like fictional portraits, in which quotations from his works and letters are uttered – either directly or indirectly – by a fictional but convincing Wilde mirroring… himself and his own celebrity cult(-ure) and myth. This paper will examine the way this contemporary rebirth actually takes place. I will show how narration plays a most compelling and stimulating role in those afterlives of Oscar Wilde. Be it in the form of fictional diaries, letters or interviews, the way the author’s story is told offers a wonderful means of not only reviving and circulating Wilde’s own cultivated past self and discourse, but also of making contemporary readers want to know more about the real character depicted in those portrayals, thus reviving him further, on their own. To illustrate my argument, I will focus on a selection of fictional portraits of Oscar Wilde published in the last three decades, and whose titles already speak volumes: Peter Ackroyd’s thought-provoking The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), C. Robert Holloway’s fanciful The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde (1998), Merlin Holland’s witty and informative Coffee with Oscar Wilde (2007) and the website ‘Dialogus’ (http://www.dialogus2.org), where people can write letters to all kinds of famous characters from the past (Wilde included) and expect, in the near-future, some answer from the very ‘hand’ of those celebrities.