ISBN Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife book English 304 pages

Borrowing its title from Oscar Wilde’s essay "The Decay of Lying," this study engages questions of fraudulent authorship in the literary afterlife of Oscar Wilde. The unique cultural moment of Wilde’s early-twentieth-century afterlife, Gregory Mackie argues, afforded a space for marginal and transgressive forms of literary production that, ironically enough, Wilde himself would have endorsed. Beautiful Untrue Things recovers the careers of several forgers who successfully inhabited the persona of the Victorian era’s most infamous homosexual and arguably its most successful dramatist.More broadly, this study tells a larger story about Oscar Wilde’s continued cultural impact at a moment when he had fallen out of favour with the literary establishment. It probes the activities of a series of eccentric and often outrageous figures who inhabited Oscar Wilde’s much-mythologized authorial persona – in forging him, they effectively wrote as Wilde – in order to argue that literary forgery can be reimagined as a form of performance. But to forge Wilde and generate "beautiful untrue things" in his name is not only an exercise in role-playing – it is also crucially a form of imaginative world-making, resembling what we describe today as fan fiction.

Gregory Mackie is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia.

"The study illuminates in meticulous detail the paradoxical relationship between forgery and authenticity in the Wildean sense: a good fake makes a good original. In four chapters Mackie maps out the structures of the meta-canon of Wilde’s literary afterlife." Katharina Herold, The Wildean"Gregory Mackie treats the reader to stories attesting to the profound interest that Wilde’s persona and literary output generated even decades after his death. And aside from the cult of authorial personality, the study also documents those elements of Wilde’s style – the epigrammatic wit, the droll dependence on paradox – that made it ideal for pastiche or forgery."Rebecca N. Mitchell, Department of English, University of Birmingham"Gregory Mackie has translated an almost dizzying amount of archival research into a study that is both entertaining and illuminating. Squarely trained on Oscar Wilde, Beautiful Untrue Things surprises by looking for things decidedly not-Wilde. Mackie has, in other words, crafted a book rich in original insights by using a new lens: Wilde forgeries." Ellen Crowell, Department of English, Saint Louis University