Oscar Wildes Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, & the Art of Forgery by Joseph Bristow & Rebecca N.Mitchell

57 in stock

234mm x 155mm x 31mm

Pages: 488

In Oscar WildeGÇÖs Chatterton, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore WildeGÇÖs fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive notes that Wilde took on the brilliant forger who inspired not only Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats but also Victorian artists and authors. Bristow and Mitchell argue that WildeGÇÖs substantial GǣChattertonGǥ notebook, which previous scholars have deemed a work of plagiarism, is central to his development as a gifted writer of criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry. This volume, which covers the whole span of WildeGÇÖs career, reveals that his research on Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery, especially in later works such as GǣThe Portrait of Mr. W. H.,Gǥ The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Grounded in painstaking archival research that draws on previously undiscovered sources, Oscar WildeGÇÖs Chatterton explains why, in WildeGÇÖs personal canon of great writers (which included such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Th+¬ophile Gautier, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Chatterton stood as an equal in this most distinguished company.