Professor of English Chris Foss

Professor of English Chris Foss participated in a Book Party event at a conference reception for the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), held this year on Friday, Nov. 14 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The event celebrated the publication of books by NAVSA members in 2024/2025. Foss’s book, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, was also featured at the University of Virginia Press’s book exhibit table during the conference.

Cover for The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales.

Professor of English Chris Foss

Professor of English Chris Foss participated in a Recent Books Showcase as part of the program for the The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale annual conference, held on Zoom early in May. This small but international meeting featured two days of presenters hailing from nine different countries.  Foss talked about his new book, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, published in April by the University of Virginia Press.

Foss was also featured in an Author’s Corner interview for the University of Virginia Press’s website.  He answered five questions related to his recently published book. The interview may be found at: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/author-corner/authors-corner-with-chris-foss-author-of-the-importance-of-being-different/

Professor of English Chris Foss

Professor of English Chris Foss has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture, which publishes interdisciplinary work, both scholarly and creative, authored by autistic people and allistic allies.

In addition, Foss published a new book with UVA Press titled The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. See book.

Over the course of his remarkable career, Oscar Wilde published two volumes of fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. Both collections feature numerous stories with protagonists who may be said to be disability-aligned, owing to their pronounced physical differences.

In Foss’s book he explores the way that Wilde’s stories problematically replicate many of the Victorian era’s typical responses to disability but also the ways they diverge, offering a more progressive orientation—both through more sympathetic identifications with disability-aligned characters and through a self-conscious foregrounding of the mechanisms of pity and the consumption of pain. The first ever monograph to examine Wilde’s work through a disability studies lens, this groundbreaking book encompasses all of his fairy tales as well as his writings during and after imprisonment. Even though Wilde unflinchingly represented the extent to which these peculiar bodies suffered rejection by society, he encouraged his readers to embrace them and to advocate for emotional responses that engage love and kindness toward both individual transformation and social change.

Foss will read from his newly published book on April 24 at 5:00 p.m. in Combs 139. He’ll talk about and read from the book for about 30 minutes and take questions from the audience. Refreshments provided.

Professor of English Chris Foss

Professor of English Chris Foss presented a conference paper entitled “Temporal Fusion(s) in Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde” at last month’s Nineteenth Century Studies Association Annual Conference in New Orleans.

Foss explored how Hester Travers Smith’s 1923 book detailing her conversations with the dead man represents a fascinating instance of such fusion, a unique dramatic rendering of Wilde’s afterlife that does not simply preserve a pre-existing particular portrait of the artist but rather seeks to animate a new creation entirely—a discarnate Oscar stitched together from Travers Smith’s own desires to experience direct access to the thoughts and opinions of the (in)famous author.  Her otherworldly communicator offered denizens of the Roaring Twenties a “speaking tour” from the beyond no less carefully curated than all the popular adaptations on stage and screen since.

In the end, Psychic Messages reveals more about its author and her own day than it provides new insights into Wilde’s life and work, but far from representing an offensive cannibalization of the great wit and writer, it serves as an engaging example of how Oscar will continue to live on in the hearts and minds of his many admirers.

A bookshelf of Wilde-related paraphernalia

Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper entitled “ ‘The secret of life is suffering’: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis as Hard Times Survival Guide” on Sun. Oct. 8th at The Victorians Institute’s Annual Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the paper Foss argued that (as an analysis of De Profundis, his tour de force letter written in Reading Gaol so powerfully relates) Wilde’s prison experience ultimately serves to bring his former life as a prince of pleasure “into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.” In spite of (or, rather, more accurately, because of) the bodily debilitation and psychological distress he endures while incarcerated, such hard times increase his appreciation for the beauty and value of those lives dominated by difficulty, convincing Wilde to champion as his own chosen confraternity in the few years remaining to him persons variously marginalized and/or pilloried by society.