Talk on the Wilde Side explains the role the popular press plays in producing and disemminating normative concepts of masculinity. Focusing on newspaper reports of the trials of Oscar Wilde, the book demonstrates how Wilde was presented as the iconic embodiment of a new type' of sexual actor - the male homosexual. Acceptible norms of journalism, however, meant that the depiction of this new category was limited to that of the antithesis' of normal' masculinity. In order to elucidate this journalistic strategy and its continuing effects today, Ed Cohen examines the ways normative masculinity was construed as a problem for the middle class throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Taking up bourgeois discussions of manliness' as they appeared in various political, religious, medical, legal, and literary (con)texts, the book skilfully demonstrates the sexual mappings that the engendering of the proper' Englishman entailed.