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Beautiful Untrue Things

Gregory Mackie

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Beautiful Untrue Things explores the astonishing flurry of Oscar Wilde forgeries that circulated in the early twentieth century, offering an innovative reading that considers literary forgery a form of fan fiction.
Hardback
11-July-2019
304 Pages
$162.00
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Borrowing its title from Oscar Wilde's essay "The Decay of Lying," this study engages questions of fraudulent authorship in the literary afterlife of Oscar Wilde. The unique cultural moment of Wilde's early-twentieth-century afterlife, Gregory Mackie argues, afforded a space for marginal and transgressive forms of literary production that, ironically enough, Wilde himself would have endorsed. Beautiful Untrue Things recovers the careers of several forgers who successfully inhabited the persona of the Victorian era's most infamous homosexual and arguably its most successful dramatist.

More broadly, this study tells a larger story about Oscar Wilde's continued cultural impact at a moment when he had fallen out of favour with the literary establishment. It probes the activities of a series of eccentric and often outrageous figures who inhabited Oscar Wilde's much-mythologized authorial persona in forging him, they effectively wrote as Wilde in order to argue that literary forgery can be reimagined as a form of performance. But to forge Wilde and generate "beautiful untrue things" in his name is not only an exercise in role-playing it is also crucially a form of imaginative world-making, resembling what we describe today as fan fiction.

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$162.00
Ships in 3-5 business days
Hurry up! Current stock:

Beautiful Untrue Things

$162.00

Description

Borrowing its title from Oscar Wilde's essay "The Decay of Lying," this study engages questions of fraudulent authorship in the literary afterlife of Oscar Wilde. The unique cultural moment of Wilde's early-twentieth-century afterlife, Gregory Mackie argues, afforded a space for marginal and transgressive forms of literary production that, ironically enough, Wilde himself would have endorsed. Beautiful Untrue Things recovers the careers of several forgers who successfully inhabited the persona of the Victorian era's most infamous homosexual and arguably its most successful dramatist.

More broadly, this study tells a larger story about Oscar Wilde's continued cultural impact at a moment when he had fallen out of favour with the literary establishment. It probes the activities of a series of eccentric and often outrageous figures who inhabited Oscar Wilde's much-mythologized authorial persona in forging him, they effectively wrote as Wilde in order to argue that literary forgery can be reimagined as a form of performance. But to forge Wilde and generate "beautiful untrue things" in his name is not only an exercise in role-playing it is also crucially a form of imaginative world-making, resembling what we describe today as fan fiction.

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