aestheticism and oscar wilde

学士论文

1. Introduction

The 19th century sees a variety of literary movements in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. As one of those literary movements, aestheticism, the anti-utilitarianism movement, rises suddenly at the end of the 19th century and withers away soon. Due to the intensifying crisis, the fashion of aestheticism began to decline after 1930s. Oscar Wilde，known as the milestone of aestheticism, has been deprived of his reasonable reputation in the literary world. However, the gold will shine. In the recent years, the studies of aestheticism and Oscar Wilde have begun to shine in the literature field.

Jerusha Mccormack believes, “To talk about Wilde s fiction, is to talk about everything, for Oscar Wilde was his own best work of art.”(Peter Raby, 2001: 96) Jerusha Mccormack s study focuses on the examination of the oral characters in his fictions.

However, this paper intends to explore Oscar Wilde s aestheticism on the basis of his fiction The Picture of Dorian Gray. This paper consists of five parts. The first part is the introduction. The second part seeks to give the general introduction to Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism views as well as the era in which he lived. A detailed analysis of the aestheticism in The Picture of Dorian Gray follows in the third part. The fourth part of this paper is devoted to the inspiration the modern people can draw from Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism to deal with machinery civilization. With the study of the aestheticism views of Oscar Wilde, the further meaning of the slogan “Art for art s sake” both in the literary world and in the society will be reconsidered. The conclusion of this paper constitutes the last part.

2. Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism

This part is to give a brief introduction to aestheticism, Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism views as well as the Victorian era in which he lived.

2.1. A brief introduction to aestheticism

Though Oscar Wilde is the incarnation of the aestheticism schools, we can t afford to ignore the other artists of the aesthetes. It is imperative that we should give a general introduction to aestheticism in the following paragraphs.Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that studies the principles of beauty especially in art. Aestheticism is the collection of all the fruits of aesthetics.“The word aesthetic was first found in Aesthetica, appearing as a Latin word, which is the name of two books written by Alexander Baumgarten, 1714---1762.”(Williams, 2005: 31) Baumgarten believes