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This chapter presents a reading of John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Oscar Wilde's De Profundis (1897). In both texts, the recording consciousness of a prisoner explains the reasons for his imprisonment; the narrative is therefore restricted to events and interactions that changed the author's past life and created his literary persona's new responses to them: self-knowledge. The protagonist of each narrative is thus a doubly displaced persona—not only a literary construct but also a shadow from the past—and no longer a separate consciousness except insofar as this is represented by the converted prison writer's quotations of his reprobate self's speech or thoughts. The memorial testimony of the prisoner connotes the experiences of his narrative's shadowy protagonist but specifies different perceptions of these experiences. In this way, each prisoner offers his recollections of personal memories as expert interpretations of historic actions, and description or analysis is coupled with dramatic dialogue.

Chapters one to three examined serious scholarly attempts to historicize ancient Greek pederasty. The historicisms of the German and British universities, however, produced graduates who developed altogether more self‐consciously rhetorical, metaphorical translations of ancient pederastic pedagogy. In the texts of Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster and Sigmund Freud, the Greek teaching scene becomes a far more flexible model for thinking about the formation of modern masculinity in relation to ancient counterparts. In chapter four, we consider the most infamous product of Oxford Hellenism, Oscar Wilde and his courtroom speech of 1895 in defence of male love and friendship, to ask what he thought he was doing: what did Wilde mean by “Platonic love”? Could a Platonic lesson be taught outside Oxford's cloisters in a public setting? The chapter continues by examining the reverberations and resonances of Wilde's speech in his later writing, De Profundis, and in E. M. Forster's Maurice.

In the early 1880s, Henry James made the transatlantic aesthete his own despite the figure's increasing association with Oscar Wilde. Though James privately dissociated himself from Wilde's artistic, sexual and identity politics, vestigial markers remain apparent in James's fiction. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Wilde situated his art theory in reaction to that of James and James McNeill Whistler, defining an oppositional aesthetic through a process of imaginative review-as-revision that aimed to mitigate Realism's vivisectionist tendencies. This chapter marks the demise of Aestheticism and the beginning of James's decadent turn. First, it analyses the language of puerility and animality that pervades James's and Wilde's interaction. It then charts the manner in which, post-1895, both authors recuperate this idiom to describe an innocent and erotic child of power that radically undermines Aestheticism's moral stance. ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and De Profundis replicate and interrogate the unmitigated state of moral crisis that resulted from Wilde's trial. In this final crisis, both narratives radically reassess Aestheticism's central tenets, particularly its uncoupling of the aesthetic and the moral.

De Profundis, Wilde's autobiographical letter, is motivated by a double silence, and with it, a double secret and a double responsibility that say much about Wilde's concept of the I in its relation to the other. These two silences, which bring us into the arena of autobiography yet also bar entrance to it because muteness threatens to make confession problematic, are divided over whether that relation is under the aegis of conditional or unconditional laws, repeating the same division found in the discussion of hospitality in De Quincey. This chapter considers these two cases together in Wilde's foray into “the egoistic note” he associates with modern art. The discussion of hospitality in De Quincey touched briefly on violence, and more especially, murder as an underside of hospitality in both its forms. In this chapter, murder and violence—what Derrida calls in a book on the secret, “the giving of death”—will surface as an important connecting thread because the secrets that silence portends in Wilde are generally lurid.

Once disinterred from Wordsworth's conservative ecology, the notion that life has at its heart a creative force, an unstructured potential rather than a fixed essence, raises questions that Wordsworth is unlikely to have embraced as children of his own thought. Three of these questions are addressed in this chapter. First, can a virtual reality transform the perceptual environment within which it has taken form, creating the equivalent of an unpredictable machine? Second, can intelligence, empathy, creativity, and therefore perhaps even life itself be simulated? And third, what are the implications for the self and for society if it is impossible unequivocally to divide human from inhuman contributions to poiesis. These questions are explored through discussions of Romantic theatre, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), and Thomas De Quincey's essays ‘The Apparition of the Brocken’, from Suspiria De Profundis (1845), and ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse's Telescopes’ (1846).

This chapter pays tribute to the memory of Sir Hubert Parry. It was because he was a great man that Parry was a great teacher and a great composer. Parry taught music as a part of life. There was no distinction for him between a moral problem and an artistic problem. To Parry it was morally wrong to use musical color for its own sake, or to cover up weak material with harmonic device. He remained staunchly himself, and amidst all the outpouring of modern English music, his work remains supreme. The secret of Parry's greatness as a teacher was his broad-minded sympathy; his was not that so-called broadmindedness which comes of want of conviction; but in appraising a composer's work he was able to set these on one side and see beyond them. He is best known for his choral works on the Blest Pair of Sirens, De Profundis, and Job.

This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which highlights how apparent polarities become the permanently unsettled stuff of Wildean paradox. It considers the essay's contributory discourses of politics and culture, where Wilde imagines a world, adjacent to the imaginative world of The Importance of Being Earnest, in which individual desire is fully and joyfully free. The chapter also discusses Wilde's prison letter entitled De Profundis.

The role of Oscar Wilde in the development of homosexual culture and identity is well appreciated but the degree to which his life and art (and life as art) were implicated or involved with religion has been highly controversial. Whilst Wilde greatly relished the artistic possibilities offered by the play of concealment and revelation, the result of his trials in 1895 was public humiliation and suffering. Wilde considered and even employed some aspects of the trope of queer martyrdom in order to try to redeem his experience of abjection (notably in ‘De Profundis’). However, he and some of his fellow travellers stepped away from this mode of the construction of the queer self because of the limitations it placed on open sexual expression. Thenceforth a split began to open up between those inhabiting lives in the closet within the Church and others, such as Edward Carpenter, who resigned from the priesthood in order to live more openly sexual lives. This helps to explain why the gay liberation movement of the later twentieth century often rejected the queer heritage of religion and many Christians have equally rejected open expression of same-sex desire as a central component of identity.

This chapter focuses on Wilde’s special kinship with Euripides, whom he saw as ‘the great humanist of Hellas’. It argues that that kinship, nurtured in free and fertile soil at Oxford, declares itself most profoundly in Wilde’s ‘Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis’, and particularly his provocative reinvention of Isaiah’s Man of Sorrows as the consummate Individualist and archetypal Artist. It further argues that Wilde’s notion of Christian autarkeia and self-fulfilment is founded in Euripidean humanism, and his exposition of Christ’s ‘dangerous idea’ (love for the sinner) is steeped in Euripides’ progressive idea of redemptive love as exemplified in Heracles, a play Wilde professed to know intimately. The chapter also explores the likely influence of De Profundis on Frederic Manning’s Euripidean concept of autarkic realization through philia. It concludes that Wilde’s ‘Epistola’, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and post-prison letter to the Daily Chronicle constitute his most authentic homage to Euripides.

This chapter focuses on the animation boom in Galicia of the last two decades. It examines the different strategies employed by Galician animation studios working in the global arena, analysing three different models and their results: Dygra, an independent studio behind 3D films with Galician roots and atmosphere (The Living Forest, Summer Night, Spirit of the Forest), rewriting the local for export internationally; Bren, a studio based in Santiago de Compostela, subsidiary of the giant Barcelona-based media conglomerate Filmax, with a diversified plan of international co-productions, films based on hybrid animation and live action scenes (Pérez, the mouse of your dreams, Pérez 2), combination of 2D and 3D (Gisaku, Nocturna) and 3D animation (Donkey Xote), where the global overshadows the local, with little apparent connection to the Galician reality. Lastly, a number of alternative and personal productions with highly innovative techniques, such as De Profundis by Miguelanxo Prado, which offer a symbolic journey to the depths and a final rebirth, an ecological allegory of Galicia’s cultural resurgence after the Prestige disaster.

Chapter 4 focuses on new conceptual approaches to the study of peripheral cinemas, and Galician cinema in particular. It examines the conditions that have shaped the development of Galician cinema historically and it explores different cinematic modes, from the cinema of migration or the folkloric “gallegada”, to the post-Franco boom in Galician cinema with the emergence of a viable commercial cinema, the establishment of an auteur tradition, and the appearance of new non-conventional experimental cinema trends.