Oscar's Shadow

Oscar Wilde is undoubtedly Ireland’s most famous gay son; the difficulty regarding his reputation and legacy in the country of his birth was that for decades he was also Ireland’s most notorious gay man. In this book, Eibhear Walshe begins by pointing out that, while Wilde’s public persona and fate informed the cultural concept of the homosexual in Britain, there has been little sustained examination of cultural perceptions of his sexuality in Ireland, and this he seeks to rectify. Part of the Irish solution to the dilemma of the Wilde downfall was to present him as an Irish nationalist and victim of British legal injustice, rather than to focus on his sexuality. The late poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, for example, suggested in 1995 that, during his legal trials one hundred years previously, ‘Wilde had been magnificent in the dock and had conducted himself with as much dramatic style as an Irish patriot ever did’

Dilemma · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Irish · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy