Overview

Wrongly believed to be a parodic divertissement by the nineteenth-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Statue of John Brute reveals itself as a highly interesting intertextual universe where echoes from Shakespeare, the Restauration drama, Beckford, Gothic fiction, and many other sources of inspiration mix together in an extremely short but explosive text.At the heart of this volume is an absolutely original analysis of this relatively unknown text, meant to acknowledge its paramount importance as Oscar Wilde's source for his well-known The Picture of Dorian Gray. While trying to confute the hypotheses put forward by critics from the 1920s and 1930s who believed The Statue to be a fin-de-siècle parody of Wilde's Aesthetic masterpiece, this study anticipates its date of composition by almost twenty years – through an accurate bio-literary and corpus-stylistic analysis – thus recognising it not as a parody, but as a possible hypotext of Dorian Gray.

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9781527506022

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Fabio Ciambella holds a PhD from the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata' and is an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Viterbo, Italy. He was awarded the A.I.A./Carocci Doctoral Dissertation Prize in 2016 and a student residency scholarship at the Globe Theatre, London, in the summer of 2017. His main research interests are early modern drama, nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, the relationship between dance and literature, and media adaptations. He published a monograph on dance in nineteenth-century British literature (2012), an Italian translation of Oscar Wilde's Salomé from both English and French (2012), and a monograph on dance and the Copernican revolution in Shakespeare's canon (2017).

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