Oscar Wilde’s World Literature

This chapter reads Oscar Wilde’s writings and career through the prism of world literature. The idea of world literature, originally formulated by Goethe in the 1820s, only gained wider currency in Britain at the end of the century, thanks to the influence of the English Goethe Society and its first president, Max Müller. Shortly after the establishment of the Society, in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Wilde drew on Goethe’s idea of world literature as the cornerstone for a liberal cosmopolitanism that celebrates cultural difference and sexual tolerance. Wilde’s interest in world literature found a practical outlet in Salomé (1893). The early reception of Salomé illustrates Wilde’s privileged yet precarious position between Britain and France: on both sides of the Channel his Symbolist drama was criticized from nationalist perspectives.