Louis Edwards's Oscar Wilde Discovers America: Gender, Race, and the Judas Kiss of Biofiction.

This article draws on Oscar Wilde's collected works to convey new insights about how he is depicted in biofiction, with a focus on Louis Edwards's 2003 novel Oscar Wilde Discovers America. Edwards creates a protagonist who underplays Wilde's marginalization and who struggles to see the interplay between gender, nationality, and race. The distance between character, author, and text facilitates Edwards's interrogation of biofiction itself—its biases, its lapses, and its opportunities. In part one of my analysis, I track the Judas Kiss motif across works by Wilde and within Edwards's reimagining to discuss how biofiction itself hinges on reversal and betrayal. In part two, I examine how Edwards's biofiction corrects for the historical homosociality of life-writing by surfacing the suffering of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]