Oscar Wilde Revalued, published by ELT Press in 1993, earned praise from Wilde scholars in the United States and Europe. Now, at the centenary of Wilde’s death, Professor Small’s 1993 book is succeeded by a completely new work, one that will also become essential reading for students of Wilde.

Oscar Wilde: Recent Research updates and reconceptualizes the bibliographic objectives of the earlier Oscar Wilde Revalued. This new volume surveys research on Wilde from 1992 to 2000, but in a much more explicitly evaluative manner. 

The opening chapter, “Wilde in the 1990s,” traces the main directions of Wilde research over the past decade. Critical material is then reviewed under three broad categories. The first, Biography, is concerned with the continuing fascination with Wilde’s life, and its emphasis on how critics have moved on from dissatisfaction with Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1987). 

Recent Critical Paradigms evaluates research channelled through master-narratives that have emerged in the 1990s, ways of describing Wilde’s work: the “gay” Wilde, the “Irish” Wilde, and “Wilde and Consumerism.” Wilde the Writer, the third category, centres on an important trend in research during the last decade, what might be thought the less glamorous aspects of the oeuvre—from the seriousness with which Wilde took his role as a poet, to the sheer amount of time he devoted to writing journalism, to the complexities of the production and staging of the plays. 

Oscar Wilde: Recent Research also contains sections devoted to sources and intertexts, to thematic studies, to essay collections, and to critical monographs which take Wilde as their sole subject. The book includes information about new research resources, and about manuscript discoveries and letters. It concludes with an extensive bibliography organized alphabetically and in terms of Wilde’s works and an index of critics.