Oscar Wilde Prefigured

"Drawing on the genre of caricature, Oscar Wilde Prefigured discovers a continuous but varied tradition of representations of sodomy and effeminacy. In so doing, it convincingly refutes the argument--prevalent among post-Foucauldian critics--that male homosexuality only gained public visibility in the late nineteenth century. There has been a lot of scholarly work on Wilde as the 'first' publicly gay man, in that he set the standard for literary and iconographic representations of homosexual men in the twentieth century. But here, Wilde is convincingly presented as the end point of a tradition. Janes is particularly good at navigating the intricate and overlapping fields of effeminacy, homoeroticism, and sodomy, and rethinking the relationship between them. Engagingly written, scholarly, and original, the book puts forward an unfamiliar narrative of historical continuity between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories of male homosexuality, as well as presenting readers with an extensive and exciting archive of images."-- "Stefano Evangelista, Trinity College, University of Oxford"
"In researching this fascinating book, Janes has certainly done his homework. He has uncovered, and convincingly explicated, a vast array of British cartoons and caricatures from the two centuries he surveys. He also seems to have read and mastered all the available scholarship on the queer history of this era. It's an impressive performance, and one that largely, though not entirely, eschews the thick impasto of post-modernist jargon that often belabors similar studies."
-- "Gay and Lesbian Review"
"Wilde was not quite as exceptional as he was wont to make his public believe. His extravagant self-fashioning emerged out of a culture in which anxieties regarding effeminate performance and queer desires had been building up for over a century. At the same time, he was one of many iconoclastic writers at the fin de siecle, albeit one of the most out-rageous. Oscar Wilde Prefigured by Dominic Janes and Theodore Wratislaw by D. J. Sheppard decentre Wilde in order to examine the culture that created him and the almost forgotten literary scene of 1890s writers who wanted to be him. Oscar Wilde Prefigured is--to quote its author elsewhere--a 'power romp' through the image of the queer man between 1750 and 1895, when Wilde was imprisoned. Would that more academic studies romped so beautifully."-- "Times Literary Supplement"