OSCAR WILDE IN THE UNITED STATES

Text topic: Media Interpretations

Text author: Александар Радовановић

Towards the end of 1881, a young Irish aesthete named Oscar Wilde set sail for the New World on a quest for fame and fortune. Wilde’s one-year tour around North America had a defining effect on his growth into a late Victorian cultural icon. Within this brief time span, Wilde became famous for his fame rather than a specific achievement, which today makes him a pioneer of self-promotion and a forerunner of modern celebrity culture. This paper evokes Wilde’s tour as a decisive moment in which an ambitious artist adeptly manipulated the media space and imposed himself as a celebrity in the modern sense of the word – as a controversial figure of questionable merits who stands apart from the hegemonic middle-class values, but also as a person who is deeply ingrained in contemporary culture and therefore perceived as a relevant social commentator. The tour was set in the context of the tradition of literary lectures in the Unites States and the colonial need to preserve cultural ties with the motherland. Particular attention is paid to the late nineteenth-century commercial photography as a medium on the rise and an innovative promotional tool with growing impact in literary celebrity culture. Photography was recognized as the most efficient method of building a famous person’s iconography. In Wilde’s case, the works of Napoleon Sarony proved to be a perfect display of the new medium power.