British Art, Modern Aesthetics, Decadence & Aestheticism - Literary Movements, 19th Century British Philosophy, 19th Century Irish Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism, Jesus Christ, Religion & Literature
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
In this stimulating new study, Guy Willoughby suggests that Oscar Wilde's imaginative engagement with the figure of Jesus Christ, shorn of His attachment to ecclesiastical dogma, is a key to the coherence and import of the fin de siecle writer's aesthetics. Through a rigorous but elegant discourse on each of Wilde's major (and minor) works, Willoughby argues that the author's abiding ethical and aesthetic themes coalesce around the figure referred to in De Profundis as "the precursor of the Romantic movement in life." The works discussed in detail include the fairy tales, the Poems in Prose, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the poetic dramas, essays, and Wilde's juvenile and mature verse. In contrast to those critics who have dismissed Oscar Wilde's thematic confusion or contrivance, and his "aesthetic" disdain for "the world of actual existence" (as he called it), Guy Willoughby asserts that Wilde's most urgent, overriding interest was in the relationship of art to life - and that, ultimately, his concern was to merge the two constructs, to fuse the aesthetic impulse into a radical new mode of experience. In developing this radical impulse, which must strike a sympathetic chord in our contemporary, "postmodern" reevaluation of traditional boundaries, Willoughby finds that Wilde concretized his mature, reformulated aestheticism by rereading the mission and career of Christ. In one sense, Wilde's treatment of the numinous founder of Christianity recapitulates the search of nineteenth-century scholarship for the "historical Jesus," and Willoughby traces affinities in Wilde's work with the secular Christologies of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. But in a strikingly contemporary sense Wilde looks forward to Paul Tillich or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for his Christ is an insistent iconoclast and systembreaker, his vision an impetus for a perpetual recasting of ethical or ideological distinctions. It is thus that the artist is Christ's most notable imitator, for in the WildeanBook Details
Published
April 1, 1993
Publisher
Rutherford, N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; c1993.
Pages
176
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780838634776