Demystifying Stereotypes
What exactly is a “stereotype”? Over at the Ploughshares blog, Brett Beasley explains what the word really means, and where it comes from, with a little help from Oscar Wilde.
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Oscar Wilde
28 posts
Before There Was Facebook, There Was Oscar Wilde with a Yellow Handkerchief
In January 1882, before he wrote “The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or any of the great works for which we honor him today,” Oscar Wilde…
Repetition
I have long been more comfortable with questions than answers. I like a storyline that is left open as opposed to one that ties up neatly.
My Life In Books Besides Middlemarch
Looking back on her reading life in her late teens, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead discusses the “flawed and pernicious division” between books read for pleasure and books read “because…
Oscar Wilde, Journalist
The famous playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde also spent a number of years in journalism. Scholars John Stokes and Mark W. Turner are finally collecting Wilde’s journalism from the 1880s.…
Where Betty Byrne Lived
Story is an integral part of the city of Dublin. Bronze statues of beloved writers roam the landscape, immortal: Wilde lounges “languidly on a crag in the park at Merrion Square,” while Joyce is…
Let’s Face It: Oscar Wilde Would Have Ruled Twitter
“@MargaretAtwood @JoyceCarolOates @nycnovel @NathanEnglander @Shteyngart and I are fine with Twitter,” Salman Rushdie recently declared to the anti-social-media Jonathan Franzen. If famous authors of the past had been fine with Twitter,…
Real-Life Time-Traveling Fanfic
The Toast set social media on fire with a piece of literary gossip this week, and like all the best literary gossip, it’s over 100 years old. Here it is:…
Emily Dickinson: Karaoke Queen?
For Bookish, music writer and self-described “karaoke ho” Rob Sheffield lists which songs famous authors of the past would have belted out on karaoke night. He’s unquestionably right about Oscar…
The Weird, Sad, Beautiful Lives of “Wayward Authors”
Writers aren’t exactly known for taking the road more traveled by, and the authors profiled in Andrew Shaffer’s Literary Rogues are no exception. There’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s proclivity for opium, Gustave…
A trip to The Wilde West
When Oscar Wilde visited America, he met with writers like Walt Whitman and Henry James. But during his trip, his playful quips that many of us have come to love,…
The Rumpus Interview with Elissa Schappell
Elissa Schappell and I met too many years ago to say, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. We were both waiters, which means that you serve students, scholars, fellows and…