Crossing the Boundaries: From Irishness to Britishness and Beyond
Crossing the Boundaries: From Irishness to Britishness and Beyond

Summary/Abstract: The paper intends to explore a series of strategies employed by Oscar Wilde in order to achieve a transnational dimension for his art and artistic persona. Among these, we can mention: the subverting of the official colonial discourse of power, the promotion of a transnational type of art and literature, which reflects, however, indirectly the writer’s Irish origin, the subversive treatment of the British establishment and of favorite themes of the Victorian colonial empire through the reversion of the hierarchies established by the economy of the dominant patriarchal discourse and the reconsideration of the power relations within the binary couples masculine/feminine, colonizer/colonized. Last but not least, it will assess the relevance of Wilde’s choice of French for the play Salomé in shaping the artist’s personality as a “complex, multiform creature’’, who needs to self-invent continuously by experimenting with foreign languages and spaces.

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