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

A materialist account of Wilde's writing career, based on publishing contracts and other documentation as well as detailed evidence of how he composed, this book argues that Wilde was not driven by an oppositional politics, nor was he an aesthetic "purist." Rather, he was thoroughly immersed in the contemporary "commodification of culture" in which books became product. This study surveys his writing practices across the whole of the oeuvre, and radically reinterprets the significance of his revision and "plagiarism."