TELENY REVISITED

A Special Issue of THE OSCHOLARS

Edited by

John McRae

University of Nottingham

Autumn 2008; republished with corrections June 2017

‘There was one work, Teleny, which passed from hand to hand and to which I added small touches of my own.  It was a story of corrupt and dangerous passions, although much of it read like Gray’s Anatomy.  Rabelaisian literature has never been of particular interest to me – it is always deficient in form, and stumbles under the weight of too much content – and Teleny provided only the crudest materials for an artistic fiction.  But I did not mock the book: I was pleased to read deeply in all aspects of homoerotic literature, in the records of dead love as much as in the celebration of living ones.’

–      Peter Ackroyd: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIONS
D.C. Rose	Foreword 2008 & new foreword 2017
John McRae	Preface: The Genesis of an Immodest Proposal
John McRae	The Introduction to the 1986 GMP edition of Teleny
Dominique Leroy (tr. D.C. Rose)	Teleny, Étude psychologique : Introduction to the Pré aux Clercs edition
ESSAYS
Jason Boyd	Teleny and Wilde’s Missing Gay Texts
Robin Chamberlain	Body Talk:  Physical Empathy in Teleny
Helen Davies	‘Such penetrating power’: Seeing Queerly in Teleny and Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet.
Udar K. Dhar	The Mondial Teleny Illustrations
Robert Gray and Christopher Keep	‘An Uninterrupted Current’: Homoeroticism and Collaborative Authorship in Teleny
Danielle Guérin	The Cover Story
Aaron Ho	Why Read Teleny?
Tiffany Kraft	The Spahi as Scapegoat: The ‘Little Death’ transgressed in Teleny
Deborah Lutz	A Dictionary of 19th-Century Pornography: Teleny, Language, and Melancholy at the Fin de Siècle
Jon Macy	Teleny and Camille: The Graphic Novel
Diane Mason	‘That mass of flesh, usually called an arse’: Obesity, Sex and Death in Teleny
John McRae	Eros and Thanatos: Excess of Love and Social Constraints in Inferno, Othello, and Teleny
James G. Nelson	Leonard Smithers’ Role as Publisher of Teleny
	Going Wilde in Romania: On Translating Teleny or The Reverse of The Medal into Romanian
Marcy L. Tanter	Analyzing the Rainbow: A New Reader Responds to Teleny
Christopher Wellings	Dangerous desires: the uses of women in Teleny
APPENDICES
Danielle Guérin and D.C. Rose	Bibliography / Checklist of Editions and Secondary Works
Divers hands	Notes on Contributors
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