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Oscar Wilde once defined “the highest criticism” as “the record of one's own soul,” and insisted that only by “intensifying his own personality” could the critic interpret the personality and work of others.” In Oscar Wilde in the 1990s: The Critic as Creator, Melissa Knox examines the spate of literary criticism that over the past decade has been devoted to Wilde's life and work. She focuses particularly on the resistance in much of this work to biographical and psychological understanding, but also on instances of its successful use.
Applying Wilde's standards to his critics, she finds that the best of them take to heart his idea that the aim of criticism is “to see the object as in itself it really is not.” One hundred years after Wilde's rise and catastrophic fall, Knox argues that the best and most useful Wilde criticism is written by those who embrace biography rather than a more Foucauldian “death of the author” or “author as text” perspective. Wilde's appreciation for Walter Pater's notion that everyone sees through a “thick wall of personality” makes him a prophet of sorts for Freud, who was his exact contemporary.
In reviewing this recent body of criticism, Knox examines critics speaking from a variety of perspectives: traditional literary criticism; the new historicism; gay, queer, and gender criticism; reader response criticism; Irish ethnic studies and cultural criticism; and biographic studies. The section on gay, queer, and gender criticism focuses on an interesting debate, one familiar to psychoanalysts, between “constructionists,” who regard cultures and societies as the authors of forms of sexuality, as well as of the labels assigned them, and “essentialists” who take certain forms of sexuality to be innate or natural expressions of emotional, physiological, and biological states. These opposing