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Overview
In the first book to explore the philosophical significance of Oscar Wilde's life and work, Julia Prewitt Brown establishes Wilde's importance to nineteenth-century literature and thought by placing him in the continuum of continental aesthetic philosophy from Kant and Schiller, through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, to Benjamin and Adorno. Cosmopolitan Criticism is an interdisciplinary study that should appeal not only to Wilde enthusiasts but also to readers interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and aesthetics.Editorials
Booknews
Brown (English, Boston U.) places Wilde in the continuum of continental philosophy from Kant and Schiller through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Benjamin and Adorno, discussing his conception of art, its meaning, and the contradictory relations between art and the sphere of the ethical everyday. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Harold Bloom
Julia Prewitt Brown's study of Wilde's philosophy of art is much the best analysis yet performed of Wilde's crucial place in the tradition that goes from Schiller and Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Ruskin, on to Pater, Wilde, and Walter Benjamin. Brown usefully distances Wilde from Pater's aesthetic empiricism and returns him to Kant's critical idealism.
Willard Spiegelman
At a time when apostles from all points along an ideological spectrum have denigrated art, criticism, and aesthetics, Julia Prewitt Brown has given us an elegant, persuasive, revisionary account of Oscar Wilde, a figure asnecessary to our own fin de siecle as to his own.... Placing him within the intellectual context of the German Romantics, the French Symbolistes, and his own Victorian contemporaries, Professor Brown proves herself a worthy practitioner of what Wilde labeled 'cosmopolitan criticism.'.