Rediscovering Oscar Wilde

In the same way that students of Shakespeare discuss their "Supreme Quartet" of plays, so Irish Studies has its own quartet of writers, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Wilde, whose fame is outstanding and worldwide. The inclusion of Wilde in the quartet may surprise some, but it is an incontrovertible fact that scholars are coming to appreciate Wilde's importance as a major influence on 20th century literature. Over the past years, conferences on all four members of this Irish quartet have been organized by the Princess Grace Irish Library of Monaco (the proceedings of each being published in this series), the most recent, on Wilde, in 1993. This collection of papers given at that conference, covers every aspect of Wilde's oeuvre, not only considering his plays, poetry and novels, but his family, his influence on writers both in English (such as Joyce and Stoppard) and in other languages (including Marti, Dario, Borges and Lispector). How influential and far-reaching he has become can be seen by the nationalities of those who attended the conference and contributed papers: Antonio Ballesteros Gonzalez, Mariano Baselga, Pia Brinzeu, Edward Burns, Richard Allen Cave, Davis Coakley, Jean M. Ellis D'Allessandro, Masolino D' Amico, Lawrence Danson, Denis Donoghue, Joseph Donoghue, Irene Eynat-Confino, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Robert Gordon, Warwick Gould, Merlin Holland, Joel H. Kaplan, Patricia Kellogg-Dennis, Melissa Knox, Jacques de Langlade, Donald Lawler, Jerusha Mccormack, Bart J. Moore-Gilbert, Isobel Murray, Sylvia Ostermann, Norman Page, Kerry Powell, Maria Pilar Pulido, Peter Raby, Gerd Rohmann, Roy Rosenstein, Neil Sammells, Ronald Schuchard, Theorharis Constantine Theoharis, Deirdre Toomey, Emmaneul Vernadakis, and Marie-Noelle Zeender. This is the eighth volume in the Princess Grace Irish Library Series.