Textual History

The tumultuous final decade of Oscar Wilde’s life established dynamics that would define his literary reputation and the publication history of his oeuvre. Following Wilde’s death with his estate in tatters, his friends began a careful rehabilitation of his financial and authorial legacy, led by Robert Ross, who oversaw the production of the first edition of his collected works (1908), and Walter Ledger and Christopher Sclater Millard, who compiled the first comprehensive bibliography of Wilde’s writing (1914). In the century since those pioneering efforts, interest in Wilde’s life and works only increased; recent decades have seen the recovery of elements of Wilde’s writerly corpus that were often excluded from formal editions, including his university notebooks, unpublished lectures, and manuscript fragments, as well as forged and other misattributed works. This chapter explores this rich publication history of Wilde’s writing, from the years following his death through the most recent critical editions.