Wilde Between the Sheets

<P><I>Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde Mail Bondage and De Profundis </I>argues that Oscar Wilde’s narrative strategies reveal a quick-witted ingenious fighter—an active agent who tested boundaries and recognized the dangers of doing so adopting essentialist or anti-essentialist strategies according to whatever shifting purpose he is writing with. David Walton challenges the one-dimensional view of Wilde as a tragic victim defeated by the penal system arguing that Wilde constructed a self by weaving complex networks of time and paradoxical notions of space along with a network of literary references and other intertexts. Walton goes on to claim that Wilde fashions a self while simultaneously being shaped by those he fashions creating a critical dialogue which shows that by constructing Wilde through interpretive acts he has already been partially fashioned by Wilde himself.</P><P></P>