Oscar Wilde: Criticism

by Edouard Roditi

Edouard Roditi's critical study of Oscar Wilde, originally published in 1947 in New Directions' Makers of Modern Literature Series, was a pioneering attempt to evaluate a literary reputation long distorted by the journalistic appetite for scandal. Relegating biography to a back seat, Roditi addressed the important of Wilde's ingenious, imaginative, and dialectical thought in his own time and showed how his poetry, novels, plays, and critical writings were a key influence in the shift of English and American literature away from established and aging Romanticism toward Modernism. For this first paperbound edition of his perceptive and erudite study of Wilde, Roditi has added three additional chapters touching on new material about Wilde as well as the new public attitudes about homosexuality that have evolved since the book was first published. An American long resident in Paris, Edouard Roditi is an internationally known linguist, scholar, art critic, and author and translator of a considerable number of works of fiction and poetry, criticism and biography. A collection of his witty and exotic short stories, The Delights of Turkey , is available under the New Directions imprint.

209 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Poet, essayist, and translator Edouard Roditi was born (1910) in Paris to American parents. He studied at Oxford University and earned his BA from the University of Chicago. An art critic for the French journal L’Arche for roughly 30 years, Roditi was closely associated with the Surrealist movement, and he was the first to translate the writings of the French surrealist Andre Breton into English. He lived most of his life in Paris, though he spent time in the United States and worked as a translator at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. He died in Spain in 1992.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outside of graduate students in English Literature, I doubt that anyone writes books like this anymore. Edouard Roditi's book is an in-depth, multi-faceted study of Wilde, with the author's impressive erudition on full display. It is a classic study that requires reading at a slow pace to allow for a full appreciation of the multiple clauses contained in many of the sentences and to enjoy the long, splendid and rather complex paragraphs. This is truly a work of scholarship worthy of it's subject. In his prime, Wilde may be considered something of a larger than life character and this book does justice to his life and work.
Also to be enjoyed by the careful reader are the subtle digs and brief, cutting asides with regard to the work of other critics with whom the author does not see quite eye to eye.