Review of Deaglán Ó Donghaile, “Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle”, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2020

This review sheds light on the ways Deaglán Ó Donghaile’s 2020 monograph brings to centre stage Wilde’s libertarian and individualist creed, his socialist and anarchistic thrust, his anticolonial views and alliances with Irish republicanism, together with a sympathetic closeness to the subjugated and dispossessed. Divided into seven chapters supplemented by an introductory and a concluding section, the book ranges widely over aspects concerning Wilde’s radical stances in matters of codified social hierarchies and the pressure to conform to ‘philistine’ rules, as well as the dark sides of capitalism, colonialist practices and the ascendance of consumer culture. Another distinguishing trait of Ó Donghaile’s approach is its twinned emphasis on the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ and, importantly, its systematic drawing on the author’s writings, from the literary works to interviews, speeches, correspondence, and even excerpts of unpublished material. Ó Donghaile shows how Wilde’s protean traits and dandiacal performance may sit quite easily with a stunning potential to reverse stereotypes and complicate received notions. In other words, the line between disengagement and agency is hard to draw. While resisting categorization, Wilde’s rhetoric and sparkling wit often emerge as historically inflected and animated by cultural forces that set about eroding a matrix of social conventions.