1,720,977 research outputs found
"The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan's":Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism
No full text‘Poems and The Sphinx'
No full textWhen Wilde’s Poems (1881) appeared in print, a broadside of reviews rebuked it for its derivativeness in imitating Keats, Swinburne, and a host of other poets. In recent decades, scholarship has attempted to rehabilitate Wilde’s early poems by framing his plagiarism as an authorial gesture that serves his aesthetic project. Notwithstanding this, Poems has hardly been given the attention it deserves. This chapter reassesses Wilde’s early verse, showing how it is underpinned by syncretism, where Wilde’s ‘religion of beauty’ is a fusion of Hellenic paganism with Christianity. Informed by his intellectual stimuli as an Oxford undergraduate, Wilde’s syncretic thinking prioritizes style over content. Following an overview of the thematic range, aesthetic nature, and reception of Poems, the chapter parses Wilde’s syncretic impulse, with a focus on ‘Charmides’. The closing section examines The Sphinx (1894), and how poetic artificiality, imbued by syncretism, takes a decadent turn
A Prisoner and His Soul: De Profundis
No full textDe Profundis: part-personal letter, part-attempt on Wilde’s part to pre-emptively write his own history, part-theological meditation. This chapter aims to both trace some of these generic ambiguities to the letter’s influential roots in the tradition of spiritual autobiography, a tradition beginning with Augustine, Dante and Bunyan. Furthermore, it argues that Wilde’s attitude to this tradition is a continuation of his practice of simultaneously inhabiting and deconstructing a particular genre in his creative works. The chapter discusses the way that this tradition of spiritual autobiography itself was re-shaped by Wilde, and argue that in De Profundis we can see him not only drawing on the genre, but actively and vigorously debating its efficacy and validity in a late nineteenth-century context: examining, in other words, whether it remained a valid literary means by which a prisoner and a penitent might examine the state of his own soul
Encounters with art-objects in discourse network 1890
Full text linkWhat can the study of Victorian literature gain from approaching primary texts explicitly as processing, storing, and transmitting data? I suggest that, by applying tools and methodologies from German media history that are usually reserved for technical and digital media, we can illuminate how individual texts operate and better understand Victorian texts as media, which remains an underdeveloped aspect of materialist literary study.
In analysing how Victorian texts depict encounters with traditional plastic art-objects, I develop new applications of Friedrich Kittler’s ideas of recursion and transposition, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s method of reading for Stimmung, and the theory of cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). I also propose new concepts to further our understanding of how encounters with art-objects function, such as the observer effect: the simultaneous perception of past and future meanings of an art-object.
Close readings of Michael Field’s Sight and Song and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets suggest that both volumes acknowledge encounter as a cultural technique, rather than a spontaneous, independent action by the subject. Yet they propose different roles for themselves within that technique. Michael Field’s poems purport to halt the process of recursion, but Rossetti’s demand that readers experience their own observer effects. Meanwhile, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings: Fantastic Stories and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray demonstrate the agency of art-objects vis-à-vis the cultural technique of encounter. Lee’s stories reveal the threat to an individual subject’s production of future meanings that art-objects pose, in particular through their effects of presence. In Dorian Gray, the art-object’s own data processing circumscribes the subject’s observer effect.
Each text thus evidences its operations as a medium and its complicated relationships with other media in the form of art-objects. Each processes data; recurs to art-objects, tropes, or themes and transmits future meanings thereof; and participates in the cultural technique of encounter. In so doing, these texts resisted the threats of marginalisation that faced ‘old media’ from the rise of photography and the incipient development of film at the fin de siècle
Textual History
No full textThe tumultuous final decade of Oscar Wilde’s life established dynamics that would define his literary reputation and the publication history of his oeuvre. Following Wilde’s death with his estate in tatters, his friends began a careful rehabilitation of his financial and authorial legacy, led by Robert Ross, who oversaw the production of the first edition of his collected works (1908), and Walter Ledger and Christopher Sclater Millard, who compiled the first comprehensive bibliography of Wilde’s writing (1914). In the century since those pioneering efforts, interest in Wilde’s life and works only increased; recent decades have seen the recovery of elements of Wilde’s writerly corpus that were often excluded from formal editions, including his university notebooks, unpublished lectures, and manuscript fragments, as well as forged and other misattributed works. This chapter explores this rich publication history of Wilde’s writing, from the years following his death through the most recent critical editions
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