Wilde, Oscar (1854 - 1900) | Donald Lawler (Essay Date 1994)
DONALD LAWLER (ESSAY DATE 1994)
SOURCE: Lawler, Donald. "The Gothic Wilde." In Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, edited by C. George Sandulescu, pp. 249-68. Gerrards Cross, England: Smythe, 1994.
In the following essay, Lawler examines The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salomé, and The Sphinx, asserting that these three works share "a gothicized aestheticism whose obsessive beauty-worship expresses itself in a symptomatic fixation with art's decorative character—and … a reliance on the Gothic as expressing, determining, and resolving the artistic requirements of each work."
As the 1880s were ending and the Aesthetic Movement modulating into the Decadence, Oscar Wilde was concluding a series of essays, later to be collected as Intentions, that contributed a radical aesthetic to this movement of which he had become the unacknowledged leader. Having made a case for aestheticizing Victorian...
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