Sondeep Kandola

Dr Sondeep Kandola is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and has research expertise in nineteenth-century literature and national identity with a particular focus on dissident (non-normative) sexualities at the Victorian fin de siècle. Her first monograph, published in 2011 in the British Council’s ‘Writers and their Works’ series, was on the cultural historian and writer of ghost stories Vernon Lee. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Selective Outrage: Censoring Oscar Wilde, a study (due out in 2017) which is the first to systematically uncover Wilde’s encounters with formal and informal modes of British and American censorship which, in turn, paved the way to his subsequent imprisonment for acts of ‘gross indecency’ in 1895. Although Wilde is today largely celebrated for writing society comedies such as The Importance of Being Earnest, this study sheds new light on Wilde’s career and the forgotten history of state and non-state prohibition under which he and contemporary writers like Thomas Hardy laboured. Both permissive and progressive, Wilde’s work speaks directly to the Culture Wars we are living through today.