Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: The “Father of the Romantic Movement”

Clark Quarterly Lecture

—a lecture by Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles

Joseph Bristow is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since joining UCLA in 1996, he has conducted much of his research at the Clark Library, where he has also arranged two yearlong academic programs as Clark professor, directed three NEH summer seminars, and taught four Ahmanson-funded upper-division classes on the Clark’s extensive Wilde archive. In the past ten years he has edited four collections of essays relating to Wilde and his circle, and he has published both the Oxford English Texts and World’s Classics edition of Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

This lecture is drawn from his most recent study, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery, which he co-authored with Rebecca N. Mitchell. This study, which focuses on Wilde’s lengthy notebook about the teenage forger Thomas Chatterton, was published by Yale University Press in 2015.