Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie
University of Toronto Press
2025
Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies chronicles Wilde’s lifelong relationship with the French capital, the city he called “the most wonderful city in the world,” and the site of his rise to literary fame, self-imposed exile, and eventual death.
Focused on the 1880s to the 1940s, editors Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie shed light on this vibrant, transnational chapter of Wilde’s life and legacy. Contributors document how his relationship with the city developed in literature, journalism, and the visual arts, as well as in the city’s famous cafés, bars, restaurants, hotels, and cemeteries.
This collection highlights three touchstones in the relationship between Wilde and Paris: his Parisian self-fashioning, the impact of the city’s cultural scene on his career, and his legacy’s absorption into the myth of Paris as a place of artistic and sexual freedom.
Whether Wilde is viewed as ambitious aesthete, Francophile flâneur, or disreputable expatriate, Oscar Wilde’s Paris tells the story of how one man’s life became intertwined with the cultural imagination of a city, and how that city, in turn, claimed him as its own.
About the Editors
Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie
Colette Colligan is a professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Angers in France.
Gregory Mackie
Gregory Mackie is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and the Norman Colbeck Curator of Rare Books at the University of British Columbia.