Oscar Wilde’s Modernist Legacies

Oscar Wilde’s Modernist Legacies

Date/Time
Friday, June 5 – Saturday, June 6
9:00 am PDT – 5:00 pm PDT

Location
UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
2520 Cimarron Street

Organized by Professors Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles, and Deaglán Ó Donghaile, Liverpool John Moores University

A central figure in the literary and cultural spheres of the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was also the originator of Irish modernism. Still, literary scholarship has largely sidelined his powerful influence over this movement. Regarded by his contemporaries as an outstanding artist, critic, and public intellectual until his imprisonment in 1895, current research on Wilde tends to confine his leading presence within the late Victorian aesthetic and decadent movements. By highlighting this overlooked aspect of Wilde’s legacy, “Oscar Wilde’s Modernist Legacies” will raise critical and theoretical awareness of his influence over modernist innovation not only within the field of literary production but also in related artistic areas in Ireland and beyond.

The literary revival of the 1890s has been cited as the launching ground for experimental modernism in Ireland, with the publication and staging of works by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), John Millington Synge (1871–1909), and Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) that celebrate rural or Celticist versions of modernity. The revival’s longer-term origins, however, can be traced to the metropolitan and radical aesthetes, feminists, queer artists, anarchists, and Irish separatists who belonged to the milieus in which Oscar Wilde moved.  This conference will draw on the Clark Library’s imposing archive, the “Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle Collection,” to explore the dialogues that these figures established, along with their interactions with traditions of Irish and, more broadly, American and European modernism.

Organized thematically around the materials held at the Clark Library, the conference’s opening panel will allow scholars to reflect upon important archives such as the More House Archive, the Pierre Louÿs Collection, and the Clark’s important fine press collection, which includes important material produced by the Cuala Press in Ireland (1908–1946). Besides these sources, the conference will address the library’s important collections of rare books, manuscripts (including the work of the Scottish anarchist and friend of Wilde’s, Thomas Hastie Bell), pamphlets, and ephemera relating to the interchanges between experimental writing and cultural expression of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The organizers: Deaglán Ó Donghaile, Reader in English at Liverpool John Moores University, is the author of Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Joseph Bristow, Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA, has published widely on Wilde’s life and works. His most recent monograph is Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment (Yale University Press, 2022). Currently, he is co-editing (with Yvonne Ivory and Rebecca N. Mitchell) two volumes of Wilde’s unfinished and miscellaneous writings (for Oxford University Press).

Speakers
Patrick Bixby, Arizona State University
Enda Duffy, University of California, Santa Barbara
Kate Hext, University of Exeter and Ewha Womans University
Yvonne Ivory, University of South Carolina
Gregory Mackie, The University of British Columbia
Kristin Mahoney, Michigan State University
Alex Murray, Queen’s University Belfast
Brian Ó Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame
Ana Rodríguez Navas, Loyola University Chicago

The conference is free to attend with advance registration. It will be held in-person at the Clark Library and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. No registration is required to watch the livestream.

Presentations will be recorded and made available on the Center’s YouTube Channel until December 7, 2026: youtube.com/@ucla-c1718cs

Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.

Questions about the conference?
Visit The Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies for more information.