The Irishness of both Wilde and Joyce shall be considered as an important factor in the development of their specific form of Gothicism and modernism.Īlthough androgyny in Decadence has been explored through its stock characters – such as the dandy, the hermaphrodite and the vampire – few critics have studied androgyny through moon symbolism. An examination of Wilde’s Gothic and mock-Gothic influences on Joyce’s archetypally modernist texts also enables a more general recognition of the Gothic strand that exists in many other authors’ works of modernism even in texts written by modernist writers who do not share Wilde’s and Joyce’s colonial and postcolonial Irish background. Via a specific, although not exclusive, focus on the ‘Circe’ episode, this article shall argue that Joyce uses both the Gothicism and mock-Gothicism in Wilde’s texts in an innovative fashion that is very much in keeping with modernism’s creative and innovative attitude towards literary traditions.

This article examines the importance of James Joyce’s artistic interest in, and engagement with, the life and works of Oscar Wilde-especially Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Salome (1891) and, in a slightly different manner, his mock Gothic drama, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)-to the development of a literary Modernism that owes much, especially in the case of Ulysses, to late-Victorian/fin de siècle Gothic literature.

Oscar wildes salome