ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published in 1891, and his fourth play, The Importance of Being Earnest, was first performed at St James's Theatre, London on 14 February 1895. More recently, with the development of gay and lesbian studies, gendered criticism and 'queer theory' on the one hand, and postcolonialism on the other, Wilde has become a focal figure for gay and lesbian criticism and for the newer Irish cultural history. This chapter brings together five examples of these developments and is thus rather different from many of the others. Here, the contributions do not so clearly display markedly different kinds of theory in practice which often explicitly challenge or displace another or earlier movement, but present different inflections of, or directions within, the growing field of 'transgressive' theory and criticism. The chapter considers some more of the modern relations over which this male body presides in formative texts of the late nineteenth century.
