Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) is remembered best for his sharp wit, his comedic plays and for his contribution to aestheticism and decadence. In this collection of essays, however, Wilde writes ...predominantly on socialism, anarchy and libertarianism. He believed in these passionately and was influenced among others by William Morris and John Ruskin.
This paper will focus on Robert Browning’s poetic writings, and especially on the way his poems were a constant crossroads of formal choices, from his very first publications to his last poem. He ...tried and questioned every form, every genre and every mode. His poetry was undeniably one of crossing. His poetry was never stable: as if he were impossible to satisfy or as if he never managed to create the ideal form, he systematically moved from one form to another, crossed, explored and combined genres and modes. Was it not one of the reasons why Oscar Wilde called him a ‘prose Browning’?
Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray has the rare distinction of having not only controversial content, but a controversial textual history as well. In fact, the two are inseparable. The ...prosecutors in Wilde’s trials made use of the fact that Wilde had changed—or ‘purged’, as they put it—many aspects of the novel after its first appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. But neither they nor the majority of Wilde readers knew that his original typescript had already undergone a great deal of censorship without Wilde’s permission before the novel found its way into print. In this paper I investigate these three texts—the typescript, the magazine version, and the first edition—using both the methods of textual studies and the methods of social and literary history, showing that the various texts of The Picture of Dorian Gray actually embody different arguments about the status of material objects themselves. Wilde’s only novel has long been recognized as a critique of Victorian society, but only by understanding it as social in its material instantiations can we come to understand the full scale and shape of that critique today.
The veneration of the iceberg principle, first articulated in Death in the Afternoon , has obscured the complexity of Hemingway’s artistic development. The bull fight book marks a decisive turn away ...from the art of “the omitted.” Offering itself as an experience of learning how to see, Death in the Afternoon immerses its reader in the awkwardness of being “a person unfamiliar” with a complex and demanding—although “minor”—art. Like Juan Belmonte, Hemingway now finds that in order to improve his style he must “break the rules” that have governed his early practice. The re-sult is an awkward form in which, rather than leaving things out, Heming -way risks the ungainliness of a book that “would have had everything in it.”
This article examines the limited evidence concerning Proust's knowledge of Wilde as a man and as a writer : the accounts of their meetings are second-hand and the record of Proust 's reading of ...Wilde suggests that he had read at most a couple of lines of his work. Thanh to what Pierre Bayard defines as the 'bibliothèque collective ', he nevertheless knew enough about Wilde to cite him. In curious reciprocity, Wilde anticipated Proust by plagiarizing his work avant la lettre. Proust alludes to Wilde twice in Sodome et Gomorrhe, and though he is at pains not to name him, he implicitly acknowledges that they shared the same aesthetic agenda : penning the literary portrait of homosexuality.
...Beauty apparently came in many guises including the carpets and wallpapers designed by William Morris (1834-96) that were de rigueur in the artistic home. According to Harry Quilter, art critic ...for The Spectator, "There may now be seen at many a social gathering young men and women whose lack-lustre eyes, dishevelled hair, eccentricity of attire and general appearance of weary passion, proclaim them to be members of the new school" (392-93).
In their accounts of the guild at Fitzroy Street, Michael Field express admiration for the fine collections and decorations, the “choiceness,” on display in the home, and they record delightful ...encounters with the many fascinating figures who “dwell in unity” there, such as the poet Lionel Johnson, whose “fabulous” feet are described as “tiny in girlish shoes and blue silk stockings” (122). According to Cooper, they had been led to salvation by Whym Chow, “the star of our lives, … the light of our love, of our hearts, our spirit, our religion, our imaginations” (qtd. in Thain 185). Wilde frequently connected animal cruelty to other forms of social injustice in his writing and “correlated … animal rights with those of other subjugated groups” (486), and late-Victorian neopaganism offered new ways of conceiving of human kinship with the natural world that attracted individuals like Carpenter who wished to radically rethink all forms of kinship and alliance.2 Queer discourses concerning community at the fin de siècle contributed to a broader rethinking of the ethics of interrelation that in turn fostered greater thoughtfulness about the natural world and the place of human animals within it. During the late-Victorian period, queer authors and artists often inflected their works with transnational sensibilities, conceiving of themselves as members of broader communities of taste that transcended national boundaries, and they founded expatriate communities in Fiesole, Capri, and Paris, sites where cosmopolitan aesthetic coteries fostered alternative models of kinship and domesticity.
Salome’s obsession with decadence and ornament, the preponderance of symbols, and its overall emphasis on surface leads many scholars to view the play as apolitical and a clear departure from the ...aesthetic philosophy of The Critic as Artist (1891) and The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891). I argue, however, that these are the very qualities that, counter-intuitively, make the play politically and culturally relevant. Salome, contrary to general critical reception, is a play that not only clearly connects to, but also extends in dramatic form the theoretical ideas about art and criticism expressed in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and The Critic as Artist. The Critic as Artist talks about criticism “deepening the mystery” of art, but in Salome, we have art deepening the mystery of this criticism. Art for art’s sake, for instance, is the intellectual lifeblood of the The Soul of Man Under Socialism and The Critic as Artist, but it also animates every aspect of Salome until no component of the play can be seen us unartistic. In this way, it becomes politically engaged. Salome is a dream, a spark of the utopian imagination “thrown off” from the social and industrial upheaval taking place in late-nineteenth century England. Salome is the conception of the absolute modification of reality (Jameson). The play’s infused aestheticism into the biblical legend represents a complete disruption and retuning of the social frequency; it recalibrates the play’s moral matrix in accord with what allows beauty to flourish. Salome poses a complete rupture from the society it opposes, and in its place sets forth a world that triumphs through the exhaltation of pure art and Beauty, or falls to ruin in their neglect. Art should never mean the same thing twice. In Salome, Wilde redefines the act of interpreting symbols as itself a dynamic form of art. When the signifiers and symbols in Salome become fixed in their interpretations, the beauty of the critical process is compromised. I call these immovable interpretations of art and symbols Faith. None of what I call the dark arts exist without Faith—fossilized interpretation. The other dark arts in Salome are prohibition, authority, and aesthetic commodification which all classify as dark arts through a purposeful violation of the critical process delineated in The Critic as Artist. Salome confronts questions concerning the role of aestheticism and how art relates to commodity culture not only in the late Victorian age, but also in the present day. I argue that, taken to its ultimate conclusion, Salome is a devastating critique of all hijackers of art—such as authority, loyalty, sanctity, political gain, profit and marketing—which use aesthetic devices to propagate an ulterior agenda. The play is not just a critique of art but a critique of the misuse of art in the sphere of action and therefore suggests a call for universal aesthetic responsibility. Salome is both a monument and a vision. It envisions a world that promotes the well-being of art because it is inseparable from the well-being of society, and represents the sanctity of art which humanity must circle around.
This essay considers methods for encouraging students at smaller, regional universities to engage in Victorian periodicals research. Even at institutions where access to hardcopy originals and ...digitized resources is limited, students desire training in research methodology in order to engage with the vast amount of material available to them in the wake of the “digital revolution.” Instructors at these institutions should work to develop teaching collections of hardcopy originals in order to complement digitized resources and to enable students to engage with the materiality of print culture.
PDF
