The Wilde legacy

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, editor

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Oscar Wilde, Trinity College’s School of English held a conference on the Wilde family. This book is the proceedings of the conference. The Wilde family was prominent, sometimes sensationally so, in the literary, scholarly, political and professional milieus of Victorian Dublin and then London. D. Coakley sketches in the social and professional background of the family; Peter Froggat and Michael Ryan assess the enduring value of Sir William Wilde’s work as medical historian and statistician, and as archaeologist and antiquarian; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin looks at the role of Oscar’s mother, Speranza, as an ancestor-figure for a contemporary woman writer. Lucy McDiarmid and Alan Sinfield write on Wilde’s trials and on the scandalous reverberations of his name in the 20th century. Robert Dunbar places Oscar Wilde’s stories for children in their Victorian context, while Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy considers their trans-formation into the successful theatre adaptation, The Star-Child. Wilde’s plays are the subject of a lively discussion between distinguished Irish playwrights and producers, Marina Carr, Thomas Kilroy, Michael Colgan and Patrick Mason.