Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century

Presents an account of Wilde's writing career, based on publishing contracts and other documentation, as well as evidence of how he composed. This book argues that Wilde was not driven by an oppositional politics, nor was he an aesthetic 'purist'. His writing practices, including his 'plagiarism', reflected the pragmatism of a professional.
This materialist account of Wilde's career as a writer contests three widely held assumptions about his success: that there is a clear distinction between his life as a journalist and his artistic celebrity; that he was an aesthetic "purist" in his attitude towards his own books; and that his career was driven by an oppositional sexual or nationalist politics The authors bring together evidence from the publishing trade, from Wilde's contracts and correspondence with publishers, and from documentation about his earnings (particularly the plays) to show that he always worked for money, but that he achieved far less financial success than is usually thought. Far from subverting the nascent consumerism of his time, he was thoroughly immersed in its values - in the commodification of culture in which books became product.