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The Dramatist

Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small

in Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century

This chapter compares Wilde's successful and unsuccessful attempts to establish himself in the popular theatre, in order to document the impact on his career of the financial disappointments of his ... More

This chapter compares Wilde's successful and unsuccessful attempts to establish himself in the popular theatre, in order to document the impact on his career of the financial disappointments of his first two plays. The relative failure of Vera to generate the income for which Wilde had hoped forced him to focus most of his energies on commercial publications. By contrast, the immediate financial return from Lady Windermere's Fan enabled him to pursue the more rarefied market of limited editions and thus to acquire for his work the distinction which their coterie readerships (with their discriminating tastes) conferred.Less

The Writer at Work

Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small

in Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century

This chapter argues that studies of Wilde's writing practices have been restricted either to individual works or to individual genres. This piecemeal approach has tended to prevent critics from ... More

This chapter argues that studies of Wilde's writing practices have been restricted either to individual works or to individual genres. This piecemeal approach has tended to prevent critics from appreciating the diversity of his motives for revision and from realizing that there is no consistent pattern to his rewriting throughout the oeuvre. His pattern of revision differed not only between but also within works. It is shown that a single text could be revised in quite disparate ways, ranging from fastidious changes to individual lexical items, to what appears to be a more casual importation of whole blocks of material, designed principally to pad out a piece. To make sense of such apparently contradictory practices we need to be aware that Wilde revised in response to a number of imperatives, only some of which concerned the aesthetic value of the work.Less

Post-Prison and Posthumous Works

Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small

in Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century

This chapter focuses on Oscar Wilde's post-prison and posthumous works. Wilde's arrest compromised his reputation and he was never again in his lifetime to be the dramatist whose satire was performed ... More

This chapter focuses on Oscar Wilde's post-prison and posthumous works. Wilde's arrest compromised his reputation and he was never again in his lifetime to be the dramatist whose satire was performed on the West End stage. However, Wilde the writer did not disappear altogether. Paradoxically, his most successful book — if success is to be understood in terms of the number of copies sold — was a post-prison work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), which ran to six editions in only five months. It seems that Wilde was still a marketable author after his disgrace, but different strategies (and different publishers) were required to sell his work.Less

A Writing Life

Annabel Annabel

in Milton's Words

This chapter discusses the writing career of John Milton in order to provide a better understanding about his use of words in this prose and poetry. It explains that rather than planning his career ... More

This chapter discusses the writing career of John Milton in order to provide a better understanding about his use of words in this prose and poetry. It explains that rather than planning his career in the cool environment of study, he wrote mostly in response to immediate stimuli from the outside world. He also loved verbal a fight and he believed that the energies released by such allowed him to ransack the coffers of his native language and fill them with words unfound by others.Less

Wilde the Writer

Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small

in Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century

This chapter sets out the focus of the book, namely Wilde's writing practices understood from a material, rather than a sexual, or psychological, or nationalist point of view. The figure who emerges ... More

This chapter sets out the focus of the book, namely Wilde's writing practices understood from a material, rather than a sexual, or psychological, or nationalist point of view. The figure who emerges from this book will be one uncongenial to some modern critics. The fundamental claim is that in his attitude towards his career as a writer, Wilde was more the conformist than the rebel, much more complicit with, than critical of the commercial interests of late 19th-century British literary and theatrical culture.Less

‘Of Making Many Books’

Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small

in Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century

This chapter explores the assertion that Wilde's celebrity came about because he acknowledged what Boucicault had observed, that he ‘wanted management’. One of the most dramatic illustrations of the ... More

This chapter explores the assertion that Wilde's celebrity came about because he acknowledged what Boucicault had observed, that he ‘wanted management’. One of the most dramatic illustrations of the arrival of that ‘management’ is to be found in the decision by Elkin Mathews, shortly before he entered into partnership with John Lane in 1892 (as the Bodley Head), to buy up the unsold sheets of Wilde's first book, Poems, and to reissue them.Less

“A Woman Who Writes Is Born to Trouble”

Catherine Oglesby

in Corra Harris and the Divided Mind of the New South

This chapter discusses Corra Harris's reflections on the difficulties of a writing career. In a letter written by George Lorimer to Corra Harris, he advised Harris to teach her daughter, who was ... More

This chapter discusses Corra Harris's reflections on the difficulties of a writing career. In a letter written by George Lorimer to Corra Harris, he advised Harris to teach her daughter, who was starting her writing career, that a woman who writes is born with trouble. Embarking on a writing career during the earlier part of her career was hard work, specifically for women who were designated and limited within the confines of traditional domestic roles. Harris's life as a writer was filled with plenty of trouble but was balanced with satisfaction and reward. At the prime of her writing career, Harris afforded the liberty to be eccentric, and to indulge her naturally insular temperament. Writing became her life's work not by choice but by necessity as she claimed. To her, the pen became her tool for deliverance. At times she viewed fame and success as providential and writing as an outlet for creativity, but at other times she viewed writings as an inescapable burden. This chapter discusses the struggles faced by Harris during the earliest years of her writing career wherein she juggled her career as a writer and her obligations as a wife and a mother. The chapter also discusses the prevailing social undertones in her literature wherein she was frequently noted for her disdain of realism, especially on references to sex, graphic portrayals of the working conditions in factories, and hardships of life in general. The chapter also discusses her inevitable need for constant praise and feedback from her editors with whom she forged a complex relationship.Less

The Bodley Head

Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small

in Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century

Modern literary historians have tended to be suspicious of Wilde's rhetoric in the 1880s about the autonomy of art and the artist. None the less they have been willing to see his post-1891 ... More

Modern literary historians have tended to be suspicious of Wilde's rhetoric in the 1880s about the autonomy of art and the artist. None the less they have been willing to see his post-1891 publications — his set of limited-edition books published by the Bodley Head — as a change of direction, as evidence of a self-conscious repudiation of the values of the mass market, a move in turn made possible by the fact that, by 1892, he was earning enough money from the theatre to allow him not to compromise his literary art. In other words, Wilde's Bodley Head books have been seen primarily as aesthetic objects (both textually and materially), designed not to make money but rather to appeal to the taste of those readers in possession of Pater's ‘special kind of temperament’: they have been taken as an indication that Wilde had finally found that elusive readership with tastes as non-commercial as he pretended his own were. This chapter shows that in his actual publishing practices Wilde seemed content in conflating aesthetic with monetary value: a social exclusiveness, which the Aesthetes had represented as a refinement of the spirit or temperament, was translated in Wilde's Bodley Head books into a simple financial elitism. Wilde was fully aware that rarity could be created by manipulating the market: that is, material rarity — the newly-revived publishing phenomenon of the limited edition could confer on his work (or be a substitute for) an aesthetic distinction which his peers had consistently refused to recognize in his writing alone.Less

A Man Singing to Himself

Carol Boggess

in James Still: A Life

The years between 1935 and 1941 were the most productive of Still’s writing career. He published 59 poems and 25 short stories in a variety of periodicals plus three books with Viking Press: Hounds ... More

The years between 1935 and 1941 were the most productive of Still’s writing career. He published 59 poems and 25 short stories in a variety of periodicals plus three books with Viking Press: Hounds on the Mountain (1937), River of Earth (1940) and On Troublesome Creek (1941). Edward Weeks at The Atlantic and Marshall Best at Viking were key to Still’s success. This chapter explores Still’s early career, including his critical move from Hindman to the log house on Dead Mare Branch. Less

Introduction

Hugh Adlington

in Penelope Fitzgerald

This chapter provides an overview of Penelope Fitzgerald’s life and writing career, showing how her literary sensibility was shaped in different ways by her intellectual and artistic education, her ... More

This chapter provides an overview of Penelope Fitzgerald’s life and writing career, showing how her literary sensibility was shaped in different ways by her intellectual and artistic education, her early family life, her career as a teacher and her philosophical and religious beliefs. In answer to the question, ‘How does she do it?’, the chapter suggests that Fitzgerald achieves ‘the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning’ through a distinctive combination of wit, literary compression, and moral purpose. The chapter also touches on Fitzgerald’s place among British and European writers of shorter fiction. It explains the structure of the book, and justifies its method of analysis: namely, the application of Fitzgerald’s critical judgments about other writers to her own work.Less

The Career of Writer

Richard Bolster

in Marie d`Agoult: The Rebel Countess

This chapter focuses on the writing career of Marie d'Agoult. It discusses some of Marie's works during the 1840s. These include an account of her life Nelida, the political novel Valentia, the ... More

This chapter focuses on the writing career of Marie d'Agoult. It discusses some of Marie's works during the 1840s. These include an account of her life Nelida, the political novel Valentia, the prophetic book Essay on Liberty, and the essay “Thoughts on Women” published in the progressive periodical La Revue Independante. This chapter also discusses Marie's relationship with German poet Georg Herwegh.Less

Faulkner's Other Collaboration, New Orleans, 1924 and 1925

Judith L. Sensibar

in Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art

This chapter examines the other collaborators in William Faulkner's writing career. It explains that aside from Estelle Oldham, Faulkner also collaborated with Sherwood and Elizabeth Anderson who ... More

This chapter examines the other collaborators in William Faulkner's writing career. It explains that aside from Estelle Oldham, Faulkner also collaborated with Sherwood and Elizabeth Anderson who were instrumental in providing him with the actual and imaginative environment he needed to begin to transform himself from poet to novelist. It also mentions that Anderson's and Estelle's imaginative responses to Faulkner's fantasies fed him with the love and he needed to push further off on his own.Less

A Culture Stillborn

in Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff

In this chapter, Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff describes how she hesitantly pursued a writing career as a young woman even though she never received any encouragement in this regard while in Egypt. She ... More

In this chapter, Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff describes how she hesitantly pursued a writing career as a young woman even though she never received any encouragement in this regard while in Egypt. She also shares her concerns about her family's apprehensions about her early efforts, which played a role in her failure to complete her second novel, Tamra.Less

Talking About (Cultural) Revolution

Marilynn Richtarik

in Stewart Parker: A Life

This chapter explains that Jamie Stewart Parker’s buoyant optimism regarding writing career, which he felt towards the end of his time in Belfast, dissipated within a few weeks of his arrival in the ... More

This chapter explains that Jamie Stewart Parker’s buoyant optimism regarding writing career, which he felt towards the end of his time in Belfast, dissipated within a few weeks of his arrival in the United States. As one piece of bad news after another reached him, he grew increasingly discouraged. However, he did not abandon his ambition to live by his writing. This chapter also emphasizes that the disappointments and humiliations of Parker’s two years in Ithaca prompted him to focus more on what he had to say and less on who might be listening. Simultaneously, the supercharged atmosphere of the US during the turbulent years from 1967 to 1969 sharpened his sense of the political potential of creative writing.Less