Speaker - Sandra Mayer

Oscar Wilde once described Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘the most brilliant of paradoxes’. It served as a model for someone who, as an Irishman and aspiring literary celebrity, shared Disraeli’s outsider status, his Byronic dandyism, his mastery of the quotable epigram, and his quest for fame in the British establishment. This lecture will look at the performances in which Wilde and Disraeli catered to the desires of an increasingly pervasive Victorian celebrity culture.

Sandra Mayer is the Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Vienna and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is the author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna: Pleasing and Teasing the Audience (2018). She is now working on a book that will explore literary celebrity and politics from the nineteenth century to the present.