Overview
Oscar Wilde is a biography of the Irish writer Oscar Wilde written by Philippe Jullian (also spelled Jullian; 1919–1977), the French illustrator, art historian, aesthete, and biographer. It was first published in French and later translated into English. The book belongs to the mainstream of twentieth-century biographical writing about Wilde, and it reflects Jullian’s abiding fascination with the artistic and social milieu of the late nineteenth century—the world of aestheticism, dandyism, Symbolism, and fin-de-siècle decadence.
The author and his context
Philippe Jullian was a distinctive figure in mid-twentieth-century French letters and the arts. Trained and active as an illustrator and draughtsman, he became widely known as a writer on the culture of the Belle Époque and on the aesthetic and decadent movements that flourished in Europe in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. His characteristic subjects were the aristocrats, artists, dandies, and eccentrics of that era, and he wrote with the sensibility of a connoisseur drawn to elegance, artifice, and the theatrical self-fashioning of his subjects.
Wilde was a natural subject for Jullian. As the most famous exponent of the English Aesthetic Movement—the apostle of “art for art’s sake,” the celebrated wit, playwright, and conversationalist whose spectacular public downfall following his trials in 1895 turned him into one of the defining tragic figures of the age—Wilde stood at the very center of the world that most interested Jullian. The biography thus sits comfortably alongside Jullian’s other studies of the personalities and atmosphere of the fin de siècle, in which the intertwining of art, social performance, and personal catastrophe was a recurring theme.
The book
Oscar Wilde is a full-length biographical study of Wilde’s life, personality, and downfall. As a work of biography rather than of literary criticism in the academic sense, it presents the arc of Wilde’s career: his rise as a celebrated wit and aesthete, his triumphs in the London literary and theatrical world, and the scandal, trials, imprisonment, and exile that destroyed him. Jullian approached the material with the eye of a cultural historian attentive to the social settings, fashions, and artistic currents that shaped Wilde and that Wilde in turn helped to embody.
The biography was written and read as part of the broad twentieth-century revival of serious interest in Wilde’s life and reputation, and it was among the accounts through which continental and English-speaking readers alike encountered Wilde’s story. It was translated into English and circulated in the English-speaking world, contributing to the ongoing biographical literature surrounding one of the most written-about figures of the late Victorian period.
