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Article: Nobert Kohl. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Article date:
- December 22, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 Nineteenth-Century Prose. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Nobert Kohl. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Trans. David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
The decade that separates the original German-language edition of Norbert Kohl's Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel from its English translation (by David Henry Wilson) has not been kind to it. Even in 1980 Kohl's work would have seemed more dutiful than exciting; in the critical landscape so drastically rearranged by the explosion of theory since then, its virtues--thoroughness, accuracy, common sense--endure, but they're not, on their own, virtues that compel eager reading. In his introduction Kohl regrets that Richard Ellman's ...