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Paul L. Fortunato’s investigation of Oscar Wilde seeks to situate Wilde firmly as an exponent of what Fortunato names “consumer modernism.” Defining his project against Wilde critics who view the author’s work as a sustained critique of mass culture, Fortunato proposes that the development of an aesthetics and ethics of consumption is key to understanding Wilde’s trajectory. The book is thus primarily engaged in a retrieval of an “aesthetics of surface [that Wilde] theorizes by building a philosophy of art through an analysis of consumer fashion” (viii).
To build a study that is rooted in mass rituals and everyday practices, Fortunato is largely concerned with those critical objects that are usually seen as peripheral to Wilde’s career. What this means is that several chapters of the book focus on the social milieus of which Wilde was a part, with Fortunato arguing that “Wilde was a professional networker,” (1) who depended for his success upon his contacts in the worlds of both mass culture and high society: “in order to be most fully himself, he needed an immediate relationship to the cosmopolis” as a commercial center (2). Discussion of social networks in Chapter One provides, for Fortunato, the necessary background to a study of the early years of Wilde’s career, with a focus on his much-neglected journalism.
The analysis of Wilde’s journalism begins with Chapter Two, “Newspaper Culture in the Pall Mall Gazette Years (1884-1890).” Here, Fortunato’s primary interest is in situating Wilde in the context of the developing new journalism of the 1880s. He argues that an understanding of Wilde’s journalistic work is imperative for an accurate picture of Wilde: “We fail to understand what is...