The picture of dorian gray (study guide)

BACKGROUND READING (GENERAL)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde [ə^əəʊ ə –

(16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer, poet, and prominent aesthete. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his many epigrams, his plays which are still revived, and the tragedy of his imprisonment and early death.

Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals, and from an early age he was tutored at home, where he showed his intelligence, becoming fluent in French and German. He attended boarding school for six years, then matriculated to university at seventeen years of age. Reading Greats, Wilde proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Trinity College, Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. His intellectual horizons were broad and he was deeply interested in the rising philosophy of aestheticism [].

After university, Wilde moved to London and into fashionable cultural and social circles, becoming a spokesman for aestheticism. He tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems and toured America and Canada lecturing extensively on the new "English Renaissance". He then returned to London, where he worked as a journalist for four years. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde was one of the best known personalities of his day. He next produced a series of dialogues and essays that developed his ideas about the supremacy of art. However, it was his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray – still widely read – that brought him more lasting recognition. The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, combined with larger social themes, drew Wilde to writing drama. He wrote Salomé in French in Paris in 1891, but it was refused a licence. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, culminating in his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.

After a series of trials, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency with other men and imprisoned for two years, held to hard labour. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six.

The Aesthetic [] Movement is a 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values over moral or social themes in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design. Generally speaking, it represents the same tendencies that symbolism [^] or decadence [] stood for in France, or decadentismo stood for in Italy, and may be considered the British branch of the same movement. It belongs to the anti-Victorian reaction and had post-Romantic roots, and as such anticipates modernism. It took place in the late Victorian period from around 1868 to 1901, and is generally considered to have ended with the trial of Oscar Wilde (which occurred in 1895). The British decadent writers were deeply influenced by the Oxford don Walter Pater and his essays published in 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty. Decadent writers used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour l'art), whose origin is debated. It is generally accepted to have been widely promoted by Théophile Gautier in France, who took the phrase to suggest that there was no connection between art and morality. The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence, they did not accept the conception of art as something moral or useful. Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music.

(from Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia)

The PREFACE

Romanticism [] was a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe. In Romanticism feelings, imagination and wild natural beauty were considered more than anything else. Romantic writers followed their feelings and emotions rather than logical thought or reason, they preferred wild natural beauty to things made by men.

Realism [] 1. awareness or acceptance of the physical universe, events, etc., as they are, as opposed to the abstract or ideal. 2. a style of painting and sculpture as well as other arts that seeks to represent the familiar or typical in real life.

Caliban [] – a character in the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare. He is an ugly slave owned by Prospero and is only half-human, since his mother is a witch and his father is an evil spirit.

Chapter 1

Grosvenor [] – a large garden square in the exclusive Mayfair district of London.

Adonis [] 1. Greek myth. a handsome youth loved by Aphrodite. 2. an extremely attractive young man.

Narcissus [] – Greek myth. A beautiful youth who fell in love with his reflection in a pool and pined away, becoming the flower that bears his name.

Cynicism [] – 1. The attitude of cynics, who believe the worst of others, esp. that all acts are selfish. 2. contempt for accepted standard, esp. of honesty or morality.

Chapter 2

Medievalism (medivalism) [] – a belief, custom or point of style copied or surviving from the Middle Ages.

Hellenic [] – relating to ancient Greece of the classical period (5^th century BC).

Hedonism [hidn] – the doctrine that the pursuit of pleasure is the highest good.

Chapter 3

Paradox [] – a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement that is or may be true.

Chapter 4

Aphorism [r^] – a short pithy saying expressing a general truth.