"Hardly a Christmas Present", Always Present

This issue of Engramma overviews various critical approaches from today’s Wilde Studies in Italy and shows how the author still provides ample space for debate in current Italian culture. The nine contributions span the fields of biography, autobiography, and studies on the self, with special attention to the concepts of self-fashioning and celebrity and pop culture (Gino Scatasta’s Nebbie londinesi e capziose dimenticanze. Wilde lettore di Dickens and Pierpaolo Martino’s Pop Wilde. Oscar Wilde nella popular culture), semiology and visual studies (Massimo Stella’s A labbra aperte: l’Immagine-Ferita di Dorian Gray. A Portrait… a Picture… a Thing?), film studies (Francesco Zucconi’s ‘Rischiare la pellicola’. Nascita del montaggio e fine del cinema in Salomè (1972) di Carmelo Bene”), performance studies (Elisa Bizzotto’s Oscar Wilde and the Rewriting of Medieval Drama and Stefano Tommasini’s “Crazed by the rigid stillness”. Maud Allan danza Salomé), comparative and reception theories (Alessandro Fambrini’s ‘La storia del mondo non è altro che un sogno’. Hanns Heinz Ewers e Oscar Wilde and Alessandra Ghezzani’s ‘Una specie di simbolista’. Borges legge Wilde). Cultural studies, particularly in their spiritualistic approaches typical of the fin de siècle, also offer privileged critical takes on Wilde’s figure and work (as in Laura Giovannelli’s The Ghost as Artist. Allusive Echoes in The Canterville Ghost). What eventually emerges as a shared critical perspective in all these essays is Wilde’s cross-cultural and cross-temporal identity as world literature.