Art as Artifice: Deploying Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying" (original) (raw)
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Double Dialogues, 2008
Tragedy is based on a lie; this will be shown to be the positive side of Tragedy. After I have explained to you the nature of this lie and its former necessity I will then consider what it means to live without the means of facing the lie that the tragic art form formerly facilitated The lies in our contemporary world are so terrifying that when identified they blind us not with insight but with our propensity to make 'evil' banal.
Wilde and the emergence of literary drama, 1880-95
This chapter reflects on Wilde’s shifting preoccupations from c. 1880-1895 in the context of the radical changes in the concept of theatre during this period. It investigates the connection between his excitement about the archaeological objectivity of early Greek play performance, and his later satiric use of classical models in his society plays, especially The Importance of Being Earnest. I show how Wilde in this 1895 play successfully channels audience-centered dramaturgical models from ancient tragedy and comedy to a new literary dramatic purpose. Overall, the chapter offers an angle, via Wilde’s engagement with Greek drama and Shakespeare, on the key but often overlooked role played by the first performances of historic authentic dramatic texts in creating the conditions for the establishment of modern literary drama.
The Cambridge Companion to Oscar …, 1997
bond of commercial prosperity, the channel of communication between nation and nation, and not unfrequently the interpreter between a man and his own conscience.' 1 It follows that, if fiction is the very stuff by which society is made, Wilde could only become a writer -and an Irishman -in England. Only there could he create himself through the fictions which formed 'the channel of communication between nation and nation', the stereotypes by which one understood the other.