CFP: Oscar Wilde, French by Sympathy? 2026 MLA Convention

The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2026 MLA Convention…

Oscar Wilde, French by Sympathy?

Toronto, 8-11 January 2026.

Oscar Wilde, an Irish playwright educated at Oxford, found his greatest literary success in London and the West End, nevertheless, writing in French to the author and critic Edmond de Goncourt, Wilde claimed that he was, ‘Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare.’ Wilde’s Francophilia is well-known and well-attested in the scholarly work of Emily Eels, David Rose, Véronique Daviau and others. His one-act tragedy Salomé was written in French before being translated into English by his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Indeed, when the Lord Chamberlain refused its dramatic license, Wilde threatened to become a French citizen and, in the end, the play was first produced by Aurélien Lugné-Poe at the Théâtre de l’OEuvre in 1896. References to French culture abound in Wilde’s poetry, plays, criticisms, and novel. In A Woman of No Importance, good Americans are said to ‘go to Paris’ when they die, and Dorian’s pivotal and poisonous book features a young Parisian who resembles Des Esseintes, the decadent protagonist of Huysmans’s À Rebours. Paris was almost a second home for Wilde, as he travelled there in the 1880s to work on his second play The Duchess of Padua and to honeymoon with Constance; in the 1890s he visited with friends and young men. It was to Dieppe and Berneval in Normandy where Wilde retreated after his release from prison, and it was to Paris once again that he returned to spend his final days of exile. He is buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery beneath a tomb sculpted by Jacob Epstein and guarded from the attention of tourists by a glass barrier.

We invite papers of 10-12 minutes that address Wilde’s works, life, influences, and connections to all things French.

• Salomé/Salome
• Aurélien Lugné-Poe and the Théâtre de l’OEuvre
• Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt
• Wilde’s French influences, e.g. Honoré de Balzac and Théophile Gautier
• Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Wilde and Decadence/Symbolism
• Paris, Dieppe or Berneval
• Wilde and national identity/cosmopolitanism
• Wilde’s relations with French writers, e.g. André Gide and Piere Louÿs
• Le Figaro, L’Echo de Paris and French language newspaper reports
• French translations, adaptations and performances of Wilde’s works
• Wilde’s influence on French literature, e.g. Gide, Jean Lorrian, Jean Cocteau
• French language biographical literature on Wilde
• Wilde’s reception in France
• Wilde’s tomb and cultural afterlife

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 50-word bio by March 16th, 2025, to Aaron Eames at aaron.philip.eames1@gmail.com.

This will be the second special session organised by the Oscar Wilde Society, which is based in London. For more information about the MLA conference, please visit https://www.mla.org/.