March 29, 2024

Chris Foss Publishes Book Chapter

Chris Foss, professor of English, has published a chapter entitled “Oscar Wilde and the Importance of Being Romantic” in Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives.  The book is a collection of essays from the University of Toronto Press (Canada’s foremost university press) edited by Joseph Bristow (one of the most renowned Wilde scholars in the world today).  Foss’s chapter delineates how Wilde’s American lecture “The English Renaissance” establishes that, for Wilde, a properly Romantic aesthetics is antisystematic and disseminative in nature, emphasizing parody and process over self-realization and synthesis.  Casting Wilde as a Romantic Ironist rather than a Romantic Egoist productively illuminates how the insincerity that for many so defines the mature Wilde actually is an extension, rather than a rejection, of the Romanticism he emphatically embraced at the beginning of his career.