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Oscar Wilde's literary criticism
Oscar Wilde essay
Oscar Wilde literary style
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Oscar Wilde was born October 16, 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Sir William Wilde, was an eye and ear surgeon. He also wrote many books about medicine as well as historical books about Ireland. His mother, Jane Elgee, was an Irish poet. She wrote under the name “Speranza”, which means “hope” in Italian, and wrote mostly about Irish folktales. It is said that his mother had the largest impact on Wilde’s decision to become a writer. She would frequently read poetry to him and his brother, William Wilde, which caused her sons to love poetry as much as she did. While it is debated when Wilde originally began writing and publishing works, many agree that it started around when his younger sister, Isola, died. He was twelve years old at the …show more content…
He studied with various famous scholars, including Arthur Palmer, R.Y. Tyrell, and Edward Dowden. He was tutored by J.P. Mahaffy. It is from Mahaffy that Wilde became interested in Greek literature. Wilde claimed that Mahaffy was “my first and best teacher” and that he was “the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things”. Wilde’s abilities as an author were noticed early on at Trinity as he was first in his class, won scholarships through competitive writing, and won the Berkeley Gold Medal, which was Trinity’s highest academic award for Greek literature. He then won a scholarship to attend Magdalen College, where he became obsessed with Aestheticism and the Decadent movement. These were artistic movements that stressed aesthetic values over social or political themes. This influenced his life heavily at the time as he began going against social norms, such as by wearing his hair long and decorating his room with small decorative pieces of art, like peacock feathers and china. He even claimed, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” This line became very famous and was even used as a slogan by other followers of the aesthetic …show more content…
He attempted to make a submission for the Chancellor’s Essay, but was not able to write to his standards. This was very unusual for him due to his background in writing and ancient literature. It was because of this that he began travelling around England, France, and the United States to give lectures and learn as much as he could about writing. Throughout all of this, he was publishing poems in magazines, which were eventually put into one book that was received well by the public. This inspired a new confidence in Wilde, which made him want to write as much as he could. He began writing shorter fictions, including The Happy Prince and Other Tales and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories. More and more stories were published and adored by the public. He became critically acclaimed as his works became more and more popular. In 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published as a story in a magazine, but was heavily criticised for its decadence, which Wilde still followed due to his beliefs in Aestheticism. He responded harshly, saying that they were just misinterpreting the novel. He says, “...those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly will see its moral lesson.” To him, the story perfectly encapsulated the aesthetic movement. Despite this, he heavily revised the book to appeal more to the critics before it was published
Oscar Wilde provides an intimate portrait of the poet, playwright, and self-described aesthete. Born one year after Wilde, in 1855, Frank Harris was much more than a contemporary. He lived in the same London social circles, knew the same people, and participated in the same events as Wilde, often by his side. Harris' biography, which is much more a recounting of the dialogue between Harris and his subject than a straight-forward narrative of Wilde's life, is directed to those outside the loop, those Victorians who misunderstood Wilde, viewing his life as just as one controversy after another. By focusing heavily on Wilde's education and the intense scrutiny of his lifestyle by England's movers and shakers, he presents Oscar Wilde as an innocent genius whose enthusiastic love of the classics, art, words, and life in general made him a victim in Victorian 1890s London. Harris uses the insight of his ...
In 1890, Oscar Wilde published his only novel that would have a hostile reaction in the British press due to its controversial themes. With tinges of "immoral topics" such as homoeroticism, hedonism, and aestheticism, the novel turned heads and shocked readers. This novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, revealed Wilde's philosophy on these topics through the use of writer's style, narrative strategy, development of character, and setting. Oscar Wilde used the controversial topics that he was surrounded by during his life, such as homoeroticism and hedonism, as many of the the main themes in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Information about historical aspects of the nineteenth century and The Picture of Dorian Gray’s publication time period we are able to perceive the influence behind the writing. Along with background information about Oscar Wilde and the hedonistic movement readers are able to contemplate the work on a deeper ingenious level and understand the novels purpose as a whole.
Wilde, Oscar, and Richard Ellmann. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writing. New York: Bantam, 1982.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a rich story which can be viewed through many literary and cultural lenses. Oscar Wilde himself purposefully filled his novel with a great many direct and indirect allusions to the literary culture of his times, so it seems appropriate to look back at his story - both the novel and the 1945 film version - in this way.
Satire is a genre of literature that many authors have written in, particularly when writing in or about the Victorian time period. Authors would write satirical novels with the intent to provide constructive social criticism, to draw attention to issues in their society, and to shame individuals, corporations, governments, and society, in general, into improvement. Two writers who successfully use satire in their works are Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. Both writers satirize gender roles and social status in their respective works of The Importance of Being Earnest and Between the Acts. In his play, Wilde utilizes the techniques of inversion and puns to get his satire across, which work together to form a specific critique of marriage and social status in a Victorian society, and those that enforce these rules. Woolf, on the other hand, uses both parody and irony to create a more relatable and less direct viewpoint on society and the people who fit into it. Both Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf use satire to criticize gender roles and social status in a Victorian society, but through different techniques direct their satire at different audiences.
Oscar Wilde did extremely well in school and excelled in oxford. He was especially exceptional in the classics courses. He was awarded multiple scholarships such as the Royal School Scholarship, the Foundation Scholarship, the Demyship scholarship, and even a Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. After graduation, He moved in with his painter friend, Frank Miles in London and published his first collection of poetry in 1881. This collection received many mixed reviews from critics, and assisted in pushing his career in writing forward. In December 1881, Oscar sailed to New York to do many lectures on aesthetics all across the United States. His tour of lectured was only scheduled to last four months, but ended up lasting almost an entire year. He delivered over 140 lectures in 260 days. Wilde also arranged for his play, “Vera,” to be performed in New York the next year. When he returned home from America, he spent the next three months in Paris writing a blank-verse tragedy that they had recruited the actress Mary Anderson for, whom turned it down after he sent it to
Oscar Wilde’s important words link to the philosophies he supports during the time of critical people.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish writer, essayist, editor and poet. He was the second of three children born to Sir Robert Wills Wilde and Jane Francesca Wilde in Dublin, Ireland. Both parents were successful; Wilde’s mother was a writer and his father a surgeon. Wilde became fluent in German and French very early in life. After his initial years of schooling at home he attended Porotra Royal School in Enniskillen, Trinity College in Dublin and Magdalen College in Oxford. Wilde excelled in his studies and began to build his reputation as a poet.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel by Oscar Wilde, shows the consequences of breaking from reality for fantasy. In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry tempts the young beautiful Dorian from his every day and normal life to a time of wild desires and whims. The ideology of Aestheticism that captivates Dorian, though seemingly glamorous, has the cost of one’s life. Oscar Wilde, known for his Aesthetic outlook, says his novel Dorian Gray is moral and lesson free. In his Preface, he goes as far to say, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel written by Oscar Wilde that stimulates the idea of aesthetics and morality especially during Victorian England. The novel encompasses ideas around the issue of devotion to art, which was at the time Wilde wrote the novel was very prevalent. The preface begins with Wilde reflecting on art, the artists as well as the importance and usefulness of the two. His conclusion to this idea is rather shocking, as he writes “All art is quite useless.” This line brings about shock yet truth behind what people thought of art during the Aesthetic Movement in Victorian England. Wilde’s belief is that real art does take any part in molding the social and moral identities or society because real art is just supposed to
In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray slowly becomes more influenced by things and people around him. Eventually, Lord Henry gifts him with a book describing a wealthy man’s pursuit of aesthetically and sensually pleasing items. “The yellow book” has a much stronger effect on Dorian Gray’s perception of beauty than Lord Henry Wotton does. Although it can be argued that Lord Henry introduced Dorian to the idea of aestheticism, the “yellow book” drives Dorian to live a life full of it, and changes his focus. Dorian shows the fact that he is not strongly influenced by Lord Henry through his interactions with Sibyl. Contrary to this, Oscar Wilde illustrates the substantial influence the yellow book has on Dorian by one, the
In conclusion, it has been reiterated that Lord Henry's influence, the changes in Dorian, and the immorality of the yellow book further enforced The Picture of Dorian Gray as a moral book. Oscar Wilde allows for those who could understand the real meaning of the novel by comprehending the importance of these three things to discern that he fully intended on writing this novel as a moral book.
Oscar Wilde was born in October 16, 1854, in the mid era of the Victorian period—which was when Queen Victoria ruled. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901.While she ruined Britain, the nation rise than never before, and no one thought that she was capable of doing that. “The Victorian era was both good and bad due to the rise and fall of the empires and many pointless wars were fought. During that time, culture and technology improved greatly” (Anne Shepherd, “Overview of the Victorian Era”). During this time period of English, England was facing countless major changes, in the way people lived and thought during this era. Today, Victorian society is mostly known as practicing strict religious or moral behavior, authoritarian, preoccupied with the way they look and being respectable. They were extremely harsh in discipline and order at all times. Determination became a usual Victorian quality, and was part of Victorian lifestyle such as religion, literature and human behavior. However, Victorian has its perks, for example they were biased, contradictory, pretense, they cared a lot of about what economic or social rank a person is, and people were not allowed to express their sexuality. Oscar Wilde was seen as an icon of the Victorian age. In his plays and writings, he uses wit, intelligence and humor. Because of his sexuality he suffered substantially the humiliation and embarrassment of imprisonment. He was married and had an affair with a man, which back then was an act of vulgarity and grossness. But, that was not what Oscar Wilde was only known for; he is remembered for criticizing the social life of the Victorian era, his wit and his amazing skills of writing. Oscar Wilde poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” typifies the Vi...
In "The Critic as Artist," Oscar Wilde writes that literature is superior to the graphic arts, because unlike paintings of sunsets or portraits or other related forms of art, literature is "soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone…but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim" (2289). Wilde goes on to express that graphic art isn't really anything that special. People might try to interpret, for example, the meaning of a sculpture, and think that it has a deeper significance that what it actually does. Wilde thinks that the artists that paint or sculpt simply make their art because it is pleasing to the eye, with colors that complement each other or "simply with certain arrangements of lines and masses" (2290), and that "it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meaning" (2290). He does say that art is very beautiful, but because it has no real meaning and is just open to various interpretations from anyone, it is inferior to Literature, which "shows us… not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and… solves once and for all the problem of art's unity" (2293).