You are here

Sos Eltis

Please help us improve with this one minute survey (opens in a new tab)
Woman smiling at camera. She wears a white shirt and has a grey jumper draped over her shoulders. She is resting her face on one hand and facing the camera.
Academic Position:
CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College:
Brasenose College
Research Interests:
Victorian, modern and contemporary literature and performance

Sos Eltis's research ranges from Victorian to modern and contemporary literature, with an emphasis on theatre and performance. Her first book, Revising Wilde traced the revisions and redrafts of Wilde's plays, revealing the philosophy and social criticism that runs through his writings, and uncovering their feminist and socialist critiques of society and subversion of theatrical traditions. In Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800-1930, she traces the development of theatrical treatments of illicit female sexuality and desire across 130 years of theatre, encompassing melodrama, sensation and problem plays, comedies of manners and suffrage theatre. She has recently written articles on a wide range of playwrights and theatrical genres, including Pinter, Coward, Beckett, Boucicault, New Drama, women's suffrage plays, and Decadent Theatre. She is currently working on an edition of Bernard Shaw's early plays, and on a new study of Oscar Wilde.

Recent Publications

  • 'Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800-1930' (OUP, 2013)
  • "A Class Act: Constance Lytton and the political, literary and dramatic dynamics of suffrage prison writings" in Feminist Modernist Studies 2:1 (2019)
  • "Oscar Wilde, Dion Boucicault and the pragmatics of being Irish: Fashioning a new brand of modern Irish Celt" in English Literature in Transition 60:3 (2017)
# Title Description Contributor
1 Making Oscar Wilde

A Book at Lunchtime seminar with Michele Mendelssohn, literary critic and cultural historian. Dr...

Michèle Mendelssohn, Sos Eltis, Hermione Lee, Charles Foster
2 Brilliant Paradoxes and Corrosive Epigrams; or Why Oscar Wilde Went to Trial

In this Open Day taster lecture, Sos Eltis explores the complex causes which motivated Oscar...

Sos Eltis
# Title Description Contributor
1 5. Wilde's Plays

In the fifth lecture in the Oscar Wilde series, Sos Eltis talks about Wilde's plays including an...

Sos Eltis
2 4. Wilde and Sexuality

Sos Eltis gives the fourth lecture in her Oscar Wilde series, looking at Wilde's sexuality and...

Sos Eltis
3 3. Art and Morality

Sos Eltis gives the third lecture in the series on Oscar Wilde, focussing on Wilde's...

Sos Eltis
4 2. Wilde, Victorian and Modernist

Sos Eltis gives the second lecture in her series on Oscar Wilde, focussing on his place in the...

Sos Eltis
5 1. The Art of Biography and the Biography of Art

The first lecture in the Oscar Wilde series in which Sos Eltis talks about Wilde's life and...

Sos Eltis
# Title Description Author
1 3. Art and Morality (handout)

Sos Eltis gives the third lecture in the series on Oscar Wilde, focussing on Wilde's...

Sos Eltis
2 2. Wilde, Victorian and Modernist (handout)

Sos Eltis gives the second lecture in her series on Oscar Wilde, focussing on his place in the...

Sos Eltis
3 1. The Art of Biography and the Biography of Art (handout)

First lecture in the Oscar Wilde series in which Sos Eltis talks about Wilde's life and his...

Sos Eltis