'Sexual Styles' of Wilde, Joyce and Enright: Desire and Irish Theatre-Fiction

This paper examines three Irish novels—Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Anne Enright’s Actress (2020)—and their engagement with sexual politics and practice of ‘novelizing’ theatre. In their works, theatre repeatedly serves as the ontological and practical locus of desire. Theatre’s collaborative, performative and decadent features were at once a source of acute tension and a creative catalyst for novelists. While critics have noted the ‘theatricality’ and the sexual politics of the respective writers’ novels, none of them acknowledged the works as pertaining to the genre of ‘theatre-fiction’, a new coinage put forth by Graham Wolfe (2019). By applying ‘theatre-fiction’ as a frame of analysis, the essay not only traces the genealogy of Irish theatre-fiction, but also investigates how this generic consciousness can enrich and explain the meaningful overlaps, transmutations, and differences within and across the various forms.