The problems and the possibility of knowledge: Oscar Wilde, Michel Foucault, and the meaning of identity

Oscar Wilde was one of the most celebrated men of the late nineteenth century, but he became one the most notorious sexual deviants towards the end of it. This designation was confirmed after his conviction for acts relating to gross indecency in 1895. Wilde's criminal trials enacted more than his guilt or his innocence, rather they inaugurated a new awareness of men interested in the same sex. This thesis proposes to understand the far-reaching, and long-standing, effects of this transformation through the methodological insights proffered by Michel Foucault. Foucault has become a gay icon in the years following his death, but he always refused the assumptions made around a "gay" identity. Rather than accepting the limitations of an essential sense of self, he argued that all sexual identities are constructed from the meanings attached to them in their historical period and cultural location. This thesis accepts the premise of this argument, and it aims to uncover the ways in which Wilde's trials informed the making of a homosexual identity at the end of the century. At the same time it accentuates how the terms and concepts used to construct Wilde's sexual identity were used in turn to create a more general recognition of men interested in the same sex. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).