Wilde West Coast

The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2027 MLA (Modern Language Association) Convention in Los Angeles, January 7–10 2027.

Oscar Wilde travelled all over North America on his 1882 lecture tour in support of the Gilbert & Sullivan opera Patience. His American experiences left a powerful impression, reflected in his fiction – the short story ‘The Canterville Ghost’ sees an American family purchase a haunted English country house and the play A Woman of No Importance features the puritanical heiress Hester Worsley – as well as in his non-fiction, for instance his journalism for The Court and Society Review. Wilde also left a lasting impression on America which would continue in Hollywood in adaptations of his work, for example the landmark Salomé (1922) starring Alla Nazimova, and, as Kate Hext has shown in Wilde in the Dream Factory (OUP, 2024), in the form of the trademark Wildean wit in classic comedy films.

Many scholars have examined Wilde’s time in the States. Michèle Mendelssohn’s Making Oscar Wilde (OUP, 2018) analyses the journalism of the period and its impact on Wilde’s self-fashioning; David M. Friedman, in Wilde in America (W.W. Norton, 2014), charts the development of Wilde’s persona and the modern idea of celebrity; while John Cooper’s website Oscar Wilde in America is an ever-expanding online resource of historical information on Wilde’s transatlantic peregrinations.

Wilde himself was not without criticism of America. He reportedly found the Eastern States ‘too much of a reflex of English manners and customs’; ‘what I like best’, he informed the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘is the civilization which the people of the West have formed for themselves’. He repeated his praise in ‘Personal Impressions of America’: ‘Perhaps the most beautiful part of America is the West, to reach which, however, involves a journey by rail of six days, racing along tied to an ugly tin-kettle of a steam engine.’ Wilde’s connections to that civilisation remain. For instance, Walter Satterthwait’s novel Wilde West (HarperCollins, 1992) imagines Wilde embroiled in a murder mystery featuring the notorious gunfighter Doc Holliday. His presence on the West Coast is also archival: LA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library is the largest collection of Wilde-related material in the world.

The Oscar Wilde Society invite papers of 10 minutes that address Wilde’s works, life, influences and connections to any of the following, particularly in relation to the West Coast:

• Wilde’s lecture tour, Patience, Richard D’Oyly Carte
• Wilde’s writings: ‘The Canterville Ghost’, ‘Personal Impressions of America’
• Wilde’s journalism: ‘The American Invasion’, ‘The American Man’
• Wilde’s American characters: Hester Worsley, Virginia Otis, The Stars and Stripes
• Fiction about Wilde, e.g. Wilde West, The Wildes, Oscar Wilde About America
• Performances/adaptations of Wilde: Salomé (1922), Wilde Salomé (2011), etc.
• Wilde and Hollywood, TV, celebrity, Bohemia, theatricality
• Wilde and LGBTQ+ movements, counterculture, pop culture
• The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Clark family, Harrison Post

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 50-word bio by March 15th, 2026, to Aaron Eames at aaron.philip.eames1@gmail.com

This will be the third special session organised by the Oscar Wilde Society, which is based in London. For more information about the MLA conference, please visit https://www.mla.org/