Dominic Janes. Oscar Wilde Prefigured

Dominic Janes’s new work, Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900, brings a fresh source base and methodology to the study of male same-sex desire in Britain. While others have used caricatures and satiric prints to analyze specific events in queer history from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, no scholar has previously sought to create an argument using primarily this type of source material over such an extended time period. Janes’s central argument is that while it “has sometimes been assumed that it was only with the trials of 1895 that dandyism, aestheticism, and sodomy became linked ... these associations went back to the eighteenth century, as evidenced by traditions of caricature” (176). Janes contends that our present understanding of this period “underplays the degree of knowledge available concerning the possibilities of same-sex eroticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (7), and that visual texts (primarily caricatures) can be used as a way of demonstrating the wide circulation of that knowledge. Visual caricature is especially good at recording what men otherwise tried to conceal, since it “was a genre predicated on exaggeration. The nuanced codes with which dissident desires were signaled in the street appear in more pronounced forms in satirical productions” (4). Janes also avoids problematically inferring continuities across too long a time period by asserting that his “aim is to explore whether such works could have been viewed as bearing sexual significance” (4, emphasis in the original), rather than arguing that they definitively did.

Aestheticism · Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Eroticism · Exaggeration · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Literature · Period (music) · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Sociology · Sodomy · European Political History Analysis · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Psychology