HOMOVISION: Will Self talks about Dorian at Polari
(video: HOMOVISION at YouTube)
Jonathan Heawood, writing at The Guardian:
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde set the gold standard for chroniclers of decadence. The story of a man who remains eternally young while his portrait ages provided the framework for Wilde’s whimsical but vicious depiction of the fin de siècle. For more than a decade, Will Self has been writing Wildean narratives of corruption and metamorphosis, and now he confronts the master head-on in an ‘imitation’ of Dorian Gray which does for the Diana generation what Wilde did for the late Victorians.
In the video above, Self refers to the controversy surrounding the cover of the book’s original edition, which was subsequently replaced with a castrated version, and then by a version with not much of anything that anyone anywhere might find objectionable.
De-gaying Will Self’s Dorian (covers: L-R Penguin, Grove Press, Berlin Verlag)
Click for Printable Version
