Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Author's Note
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorians and the Bible
- 2 Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus
- 3 The Rise of the Fictional Jesus
- 4 The Fifth Gospel of Oscar Wilde
- 5 The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde's Oral Tales
- 6 A Peculiar Protestant: The Gospels According to George Moore
- 7 George Moore's Life of Jesus
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde's Oral Tales
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Author's Note
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorians and the Bible
- 2 Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus
- 3 The Rise of the Fictional Jesus
- 4 The Fifth Gospel of Oscar Wilde
- 5 The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde's Oral Tales
- 6 A Peculiar Protestant: The Gospels According to George Moore
- 7 George Moore's Life of Jesus
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[A] story wanders far like thistle-down, and somebody hearing it […] might unexpectedly feel himself called upon to write it.
George MooreIn his 1912 study of Oscar Wilde, the writer and journalist Arthur Ransome wrote that ‘the flowers of his [Wilde's] talk bloom only in dead men's memories, and have been buried with their skulls’. This somewhat romantic notion was by no means the case, especially as regards Wilde's oral stories, a range of which were recorded in memoirs and biographical sketches about him, with some being developed into imaginative fictions of somewhat dubious literary merit. Two of the biblical tales, ‘L'Inutile Résurrection’ and ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’, considered in some detail in the previous chapter, underwent extensive refashioning in writings published well into the twentieth century, gradually losing all connection with the original teller. This chapter examines how three writers, Coulson Kernahan, Cyril Ranger Gull and Frank Harris, developed Wilde's spoken heterodoxies into their own forms of fiction and to serve their own literary and ethical purposes. These three authors were connected through their professional lives: Gull worked for the Saturday Review under Harris's editorship, and published several of his novels with Ward Lock, a company that for many years employed Kernahan as principal reader. They also had associations of varying degrees of closeness with Wilde himself. Gull, the youngest of the three, was not one of Wilde's immediate circle, being barely twenty the year Wilde was tried and imprisoned. However, his close and abiding friendship with Leonard Smithers, one of the principal publishers of 1890s’ writing and of Wilde's work in the years immediately following his release from prison, ensured that he was very much in touch with the world of the British decadents. Kernahan was rather more closely acquainted with Wilde thanks to his work for Ward Lock. Liaising with Wilde in the early 1890s over the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, he came to be on friendly terms with the author, devoting a substantial chapter to him in his book of reminiscences, In Good Company. However, of the three authors it is undoubtedly Frank Harris who would be most immediately associated with Wilde, not least because of the highly colourful account he gives of their years of friendship in Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (1916).
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- Information
- The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860–1920 , pp. 183 - 216Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010