Emer O'Sullivan

My father has a lot of friends in the publishing industry, and sometimes he’ll come back with books that he was given for free. And sometimes, he’ll think that I’d be more interested in those books than he is, so he gives them over to me to read. I have to say that I’m really glad he gave me this particular book, because if it wasn’t for him giving it to me I don’t think I would have picked it up otherwise.

What I loved about this book is that, while its main focus is, indeed, Oscar Wilde, it also delves into Wilde’s parents and who they were in their own right. The author posits the theory that we can’t truly understand the man that Oscar Wilde was without understanding the people who brought him up, because who they were heavily influenced and reflected on who Wilde eventually became.

The book is split into two distinct parts, albeit not really outlined in the book itself – the first half concerns itself with Wilde’s parents, who they were, what their interests were, and the kind of society that they kept in an Ireland that was striving for independence. The second half of the book concerns Wilde himself a lot more directly, although it does also still mention his parents and brother, as well as friends of his that are relevant to the picture that this book is trying to paint. And all in all, what this book is trying to do is something that no other biography on Wilde has done before – it’s trying to give you an image of Wilde in the context of his family.

The book is incredibly well researched and very well written. While it is a biography, and so the writing can be somewhat dry and matter-of-fact at times, it gives a complete overview of Wilde’s life – his relationships (both with family and with other people), his intellect, his education, his travels, his scandals. The book paints a picture of Wilde that I don’t think I’ve considered before. As a literature student, Wilde was always presented to me as an eccentric genius who did one too many things too outspokenly and ended up on the wrong side of the law for it. Wilde, to most of my contemporaries, is remembered as a brilliant writer, but a man who was labelled as a degenerate.

This book completely changed my mind on that. Wilde was a man with so much heart and soul, so much love and patience, and certainly an intellect that far surpassed many people. He loved attention and he knew how to get it, but he was often misguided thanks to his pride. And reading this book helped me discover so many things about him that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Some of my favourite facts I got from this book are these:

Wilde’s father was involved in a scandal involving a young woman that ended his career as a doctor, that would then be repeated with Oscar himself when his homosexuality came to light;
Wilde’s brother, Willie, had a daughter who moved to Paris and who, apparently, was notoriously homosexual like her uncle;
Wilde had two sons, one of who died in World War Two, and one of who had children who are still alive today;
The man that Wilde ended up losing his career over died not too long ago, and apparently had stated before his death that everything that people said about him was an exaggeration;
The only reason the Oscar Wilde case held any validity in court is because Wilde was notorious for befriending young male prostitutes who then testified against him in court for unruly behaviour.
If you want to learn more about Oscar Wilde in a way that is well researched and very well presenting, I couldn’t recommend this book enough.… (mehr)

This book has perhaps less about Oscar Wilde himself than most biographies because its focus is on Oscar's family and the cultural context he was raised in. The author did an good job of portraying Oscar's mother and brother in particular. However, I felt the author assumed that readers knew more about the social movements and artists of the time than most readers would. The book was educational, but not entertaining. Mostly, I was left with the feeling that I would not have wanted to be part of that society!… (mehr)

Lady Wombat says:

O’Sullivan crafts an articulate and long-overdue plea for the necessity of a comparative literature approach to be incorporated into contemporary children’s literature criticism. Her opening chapters focus on articulating a theory of comparative children’s literature studies, rather than simply drawing upon current comparative literature theory written with adult texts in mind, while the second half of the book looks more closely at issues surrounding the translation of books for children.

After discussing previous attempts at comparative children’s literature studies in Chapter 1, O’Sullivan’s chapter 2 proposes 9 theoretical areas that comparative children’s literature should incorporate. They are:
Theory of children’s literature. Three theoretical issues make the study of children’s literature different from that of adult literature: “its definition as texts assigned by adults to the group of readers comprising children’ and young people, the asymmetry of communication in children’s literature, and its belonging to both the literary and educational realms” (21).
Contact and transfer studies “Contact studies today no longer look for cause and effect but focus on dynamic processes of exchange between cultures; these studies are a point of departure for questioning the particularities of a given work and its function in that specific historical and cultural situation” (22).
Comparative poetics: Studies the poetics of different cultures: organization; narrative methods; structure features (motifs and themes), dialogic elements such as intertextuality and metafictionality, and aesthetic categories such as humour” (27). For theme and motif, don’t just list books, but analyze how the theme/motif functions (29).
Intertextuality studies: examine what texts reference what other texts (why and how/for what purpose)
Intermediality studies: Looking at how children’s texts are transferred to the larger realm of children’s culture. Such studies analyze adaptations and commodifications, of children’s texts” (36-37), for example, Margaret Mackey’s work on The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
Comparative genre studies: When and where did certain genres arise? When and where did they flourish? When and where did they wane?
Comparative historiography of children’s literature: How does the history of children’s literature in one country compare to that of another?
Comparative history of children’s literature studies: looks at “culture-specific aspects of the study of children’s literature, which in turn are influenced by how the subject is institutionally established in different cultures [i.e., in what academic discipline did children’s lit scholarship begin and develop?:] . It should also take account of the theoretical approaches and historiographical writings developing from that institutional situation and the connection between the theory and the actual production of literature for young people” (46).

In chapter 3, O’Sullivan puts some of her earlier articulated theories into practice as she argues against Zohar Shavit’s “universalizing” account of how and why children’s literature emerges in different countries (the educational ideology of intellectual movements), presenting instead different models by looking at the development of children’s literature in African countries, and in Ireland.

Chapters 4-6 take up issues of translation in children’s literature. In chapter 4, O’Sullivan examines the level of cultural and linguistic norms in translation – on “shifts in the story (what is being told – incidents, characters, objects, locations, etc.)” (81). She outlines several different types of such changes, including:
“Changes of characterization and conduct
Toning down the mention of physical functions
‘Correcting’ the creative use of language in translation [misspellings for humor; insults; bad language:]
Toning down certain linguistic registers that do not conform to the stylistic norms of children’s literature in the target culture, often in translation of varieties of humour” (82). [colloquial language; class-based language:].

Chapter 5 focuses on the translator, “in order to identify his or her presence in the translated text” (104). O’Sullivan argues that “in translated texts, therefore, a discursive presence is to be found above and beyond that of the narrator of the source text, namely that of the (implied) translator” (107). O’Sullivan describes three types of implied translator: the amplifying narrator, one who adds to the source text’s narration; the reductive narrator, one who deletes material from the source text’s narration; and the narrator who, by significantly changing the narrative voice, drowns out the original source text’s narrator. While in adult translation studies, the “invisible” implied translator is the norm, deviations from the “invisibility” model are common in translations for children’s literature, and studying these deviations should form a key component of comparative children’s literature studies, O’Sullivan suggests.

In the final chapter, O’Sullivan calls into question contemporary attempts to create a world canon of children’s literature, suggesting that such attempts run up against two problems. First, “failure to discriminate between translations and original texts is inappropriate because of the influence… of social, linguistic, educational and cultural values and norms on the transference of children’s literature across barriers of language, culture and time, and because of changes brought about in the practice of translation, some of them radically affecting the narrative structure” (147). Second, “interpretations of the original text that try to name the elements which made it a classic do not apply to every translation and adaptation of it, and certainly not to every media adaptation” (147). Despite these problems, however, O’Sullivan argues that a canon is necessary, and that a comparative approach can “shoulder the task of promoting an objectively legitimate canon” (148). Such a canon would be for scholars, not based on books’ appeals to current-day children.

O'Sullivan's challenge to the Anglo-centric focus of much contemporary children's literature criticism is certainly warranted, and the brief examples of comparative criticism that O'Sullivan includes throughout her work to illustrate her theories prove how fruitful such a comparative approach can be. Most of what she writes is common sense, but it is common sense that few twentieth-century critics took into account in their work. Her clear outline for how to approach comparative children’s literature work, as well as the many examples she provides of comparative scholarship yet to be undertaken, should serve as a ready blueprint for future work in this area, and help twenty-first-century scholars shed their English-only lenses.… (mehr)