The Author is the Creator of Brief Things: Authorial Simulacra in Oscar Wilde’s Poems in Prose

Abstract

This essay reads Oscar Wilde’s Poems in Prose (1893-1894) as authorial simulacra: brief self-figurations that stage the modern artist’s vulnerability through parabolic form. Reworking Romantic and Decadent topoi, the sequence turns compression, figuration and biblical cadence into instruments for questioning authorial authority as pose rather than stable ground. Its dialogue with Walter Pater’s imaginary portraits and Henry James’s tales of writers and artists reveals a late-Victorian genealogy of the “diaphanous” protagonist, emptied of interiority and functioning as medium. Wilde’s prose poems thus place authorship within an ecology of portable icons, where authority survives as performance calibrated to brevity.