Housing the Oscar Wilde Archive: Postmodernism’s Curation of Decadence

Abstract

Since his death, Oscar Wilde has only been accessible through documents: those he left behind, and the documents produced by friends, family, scholars, biographers, and artists. The figure we know is related to the historical original, but it is not Wilde himself. It is a Wilde born of the archive, created by the mingling of documentary evidence with archival decision-making, critical intervention, and creative imagination. Reading Wilde as an archive, then, has implications for both decadence and recent postmodern approaches to archive theory.

            This article is based on ongoing research into the relationship between decadence and postmodernism. The figure of Wilde is important, not because of anachronistic claims that Wilde is a proto-postmodernist, but because he offers an important example of the interests in history and the archive shared by decadence and postmodernism. While resisting the notion of any equivalence between postmodernism and decadence, we argue that these literary and artistic movements, separated by nearly a century, nonetheless share similar interests in disrupting notions of progress, linear history, and the objectivity of the archive.