Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage and De Profundis argues that Oscar Wilde's narrative strategies reveal a quick-witted, ingenious fighter-an active agent who tested boundaries and recognized the dangers of doing so, adopting essentialist or anti-essentialist strategies according to whatever shifting purpose he is writing with. David Walton challenges the one-dimensional view of Wilde as a tragic victim defeated by the penal system, arguing that Wilde constructed a self by weaving complex networks of time and paradoxical notions of space, along with a network of literary references and other intertexts. Walton goes on to claim that Wilde fashions a self while simultaneously being shaped by those he fashions, creating a critical dialogue which shows that, by constructing Wilde through interpretive acts, he has already been partially fashioned by Wilde himself.

DAVID WALTON "has brought hard sci-fi roaring back to life" (Wall Street Journal) with "vivid, speculative science" (David Brin) in "an expanding universe of delight" (Washington Post). His novels are action-packed thrillers with a spot-on understanding of science and technology. David hails from Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife and eight children. An engineer by day and an author by night, David won the 2008 Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel, TERMINAL MIND, and the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for THE GENIUS PLAGUE. His books have been translated into eight languages.

Acknowledgments

Preface: The Accidental Book

Chapter One: The Wilde-Angle Lens

Chapter Two: The Exposure of Private Parts: Ontology and the Fashioning of 'De Profundis'

Chapter Three: Sentencing Wilde; Wilde on Trial: the Gay Science

Chapter Four: Man of Letters: Trials, Politics and 'Homotextuality'

Chapter Five: Fashioning Wilde in the Space of the Other

Chapter Six: An Author Authored

Chapter Seven: Doing Time: Wilde chronotopes and a Poetics of Space

Chapter Eight: Sentencing a Self in the Future: the Chronotope of Future Time

Chapter Nine: Fashioning Wilde as Intertextual Man

Chapter Ten: From the multiplication of social voices to Christ on the Wilde side

Chapter Eleven: Playtex(i)t: A Dialogue

References

About the Author