Dorian Gray in Babylon Berlin - Dr. Yvonne Ivory

In this presentation to the Oscar Wilde Society, Dr. Yvonne Ivory explores how Oscar Wilde became a cult figure in the German-speaking world after his death. He had his fans among anarchists, individualists, socialists, aesthetes, expressionists and, especially, in the queer community. Some celebrated his life and mourned his martyrdom; others took up a mode of homage preferred by Wilde himself and let his work inspire their own new creations. This talk examines how some Germans reimagined The Picture of Dorian Gray from the end of Great War into the Golden Twenties. How might the lost 1917 film Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray relate to the first gay movie Anders als die Anderen (1919)? Does Franz Schreker’s risqué 1918 opera Die Gezeichneten – a smash hit in its day – owe a debt to Wilde’s novel? And what’s behind the name of Berlin’s lesbian nightclub, the Café Dorian Gray? Find out in this survey of just some of the German Pictures of Dorian Gray.

Yvonne Ivory is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Ivory’s work revolves around cultural interactions between German-speaking and English-speaking Europeans at the turn of the 20th century. Her first book, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850-1930, examined how British, Irish, and German sexual dissidents looked to the Italian Renaissance to understand their identities. She has also published on aestheticism, on the early German gay rights movement, and on Oscar Wilde’s 1895 scandal in the German press; and has articles forthcoming on competing 1907 Viennese stagings of The Picture of Dorian Grayand on the meaning of Decadence for the German actress Gertrud Eysoldt. Ivory's current project examines how Wilde and his works were reimagined by German and Austrian composers, artists, playwrights, dancers, and directors before 1939; it contends that Wildean Decadence haunts German Modernism. She is also co-editor with Prof. Joseph Bristow and Dr. Rebecca Mitchell of Wilde’s incomplete and unpublished writings for Oxford UP’s Complete Works of Oscar Wilde; in this context, she is creating authoritative editions of Wilde's dramatic fragments "La Sainte Courtisane," "A Florentine Tragedy," and "The Cardinal of Avignon." She can be reached at ivory@mailbox.sc.edu.

Видео Dorian Gray in Babylon Berlin - Dr. Yvonne Ivory канала The Oscar Wilde Society