My essay explores different definitions of the Gothic while providing evidence as to how Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray fit these various definitions and how the Gothic genre is ideal for these works.
Oscar Wilde and British Aestheticism (F21 LITR 388 / LITR 379H Columbia College Chicago) Dashboard
Description
The term "British aestheticism" refers to an avant-garde movement in England in the closing decades of the 19th century opposing bourgeois values, and promoting artistic, sexual, and political experimentation, and the pursuit of beauty. In addition to Wilde, we will read work of other central figures of the movement, including Walter Pater and William Morris. Our central focus will be Wilde's 1890/1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and its contemporary reception. We will collaboratively develop a collection of contemporary reviews of the novel, including Pater's own, which we will annotate and contextualize in essays and other assignments.
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Oscar Wilde famously said “Catholicism is the only religion to die in." In fact, the man lived and indeed died by this philosophy. A writer who is perhaps most famous, excepting his obvious authorship, for what would be considered a sin in the eyes of the Catholic church, did in fact convert to Catholicism on his death bed. It is this seeming bit of irony that is worth...
moreThe Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed on the 14th of August, 1885. In section eleven of the document it claimed that any criminals guilty of gross indecency would be sentenced to two years of hard labor. Gross indecency, in this case, included sexual activities between two people of the same gender. This act is what would get Oscar Wilde imprisoned in 1895. The man responsible for this addition is named Henry Du Pre Labouchere. He was an opponent of homosexuality and pushed for a seven year sentence for every man charged with gross indecency. The lawmakers settled on two years of hard labor in jail for those convicted. In 1898, when the Prison Act was passed, it was found that two years of prison and hard labor was too severe and became shortened.
The novel Against Nature, published in 1884, inspires this act...
moreMy essay focuses on the histories and political views that shined through in their reviews of the St. James Gazette, Punch, and the Daily Chronicle.
The conventions of the Gothic novel give way to an exploration of duality and double consciousness. We can see this in both The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
My paper focuses on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Gothic novel, and the novel's relation to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, another Gothic novel.
A brief timeline of Oscar Wilde's reception of criticism on his writing. He has several responses where he argues and fights with editors that did not like his book.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is grounded in the imperial Gothic, which is revealed through the antagonistic function of the Orient within the novel. After an investigation into how the novel employs conventions, and background on the function and uses of the genre in Victorian literature, I point the reader to the anxiety that permeated fin de siècle Britain: The arrival of the colonies in the London metropolis, and the advent of opium dens, subjecting the Englishman to a complete degeneration.
Dorian Gray's place in a gothic tradition of homoerotic monstrosity
Aestheticism and Symbolism in the Late 19th Century