ABSTRACT
Dorian Gray’s comment is often viewed as encapsulating the world-weariness of decadent life in the late nineteenth century. The literary ‘fantasies of reverse invasion’ that emerged reflected a sense of the dangers as trading routes and systems were tested in the East and the dividing lines drawn up at the Berlin Conference in 1885 between the competing imperial powers. An important insight that has emerged from Regenia Gagnier’s ‘Global Circulation’ project for Literature Compass is that linear approaches to the transnational circulation of literature seeking to identify repetition and assimilation can be misleading, given that the complexity of cultural models is more diverse than influence or spread of ideas, residing instead in cultural resonances across time periods and geographic range. Lady Narborough’s comment about ‘unfortunate bachelors’ in Wilde’s novella conjures up the contrast between respectable irregularity and its dangerous opposite of disrespectable singularity, between the cover of marriage and the exposure of celibacy.
