Oscar Wilde was the most famous gay Irishman and Oscar's Shadow deals with Wilde and his homosexuality within the context of Ireland and of Irish cultural perceptions of his sexuality. The book investigates the questions: What was 'Oscar's shadow', his influence on twentieth and twenty-first century Irish culture and literature?
If perceptions of sexual identity evolve partly through public events, how then did Irish media and literary sources configure Wildes homosexuality during his trials and after? Wildes homosexuality was a contested discourse within twentieth-century Ireland, a discourse that became interconnected with Irish cultural nationalism. Thus Wilde became a weathervane for the rare but contentious discussions of homosexuality in Ireland, and his life and his writings usefully intertwine within these debates. Oscars Shadow sets the historical context for cultural and legal perceptions of homosexuality in Ireland. This book is the first study of the formation of the idea of homosexuality in Ireland into the twentieth century and centers on an account of Wildes visible presence as sexual other, analyzing the strategies of normalization used to police his unnameable sin within Irish media and literary accounts. Using contemporary Irish newspaper reports of the Wilde trials of
