J. Robert Maguire, Ceremonies of Bravery: Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker, and the Dreyfus Affair .
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjw038
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
ResumoOSCAR WILDE’S relationships with his friend Carlos Blacker, whom he had once called ‘the best dressed man in London’, and with Commandant Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, the German spy responsible for framing Alfred Dreyfus, have largely been relegated to the periphery of Wilde studies. Wilde’s role in the Dreyfus affair gets less than two pages in Richard Ellmann’s monumental biography. And the voluminous published material on the Dreyfus affair gives scant attention to Wilde and Blacker. Notably, Jean Denis Bredin’s authoritative L’Affaire Dreyfus (2006), as Maguire points out, mentions neither Wilde nor Blacker. In his biography of Zola (1987), Alan Schomy covers Zola’s role in the Dreyfus case but ignores both Blacker and Wilde. 1 Ceremonies of Bravery is the product of decades of research that has benefited from access to documents and archival material either unavailable or not accessed by previous researchers. Blacker’s diaries, written in an early form of Pitman shorthand, remained unread until 1989, when two experts at Pitman’s Central College in London completed their seven-year task of transcribing them. (The clear implication is that Maguire himself funded this painstaking project.) Maguire also had access to the Blacker Papers at Hand’s Cove Library in Shoreham, Vermont, and the Robert Harborough Sherard Collection at the University of Reading. The chief merit of Maguire’s thoroughly researched book is that fills in a significant gap in previous studies of l’affaire Dreyfus and adds to our understanding of Wilde’s life in the first half of 1898, of his friendship with Carlos Blacker, and of his fascination with Esterhazy.
Referência(s)