Review of Caroline Sumpter’s “‘No Artist has Ethical Sympathies’: Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution.” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Clifford, D. (2013). Wilde and evolution. In K. Powell & P. Raby (Eds.), Oscar Wilde in Context (Literature in Context, pp. 211-219). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139060103.024
Oscar Wilde on the Theory of the Author
Philosophy and Literature, 2018
Throughout his career Oscar Wilde battled his contemporaries’ tendency to look at literary works through the lens of the author. He held that the practice of reading for the author misses the point of why we should go to literature in the first place, and that it runs into a number of ethical, methodological and metaphysical problems. Here I reconstruct Wilde’s position from his various pronouncements in his essays, letters and fiction, and argue that the ideal of letting the work speak for itself which emerges from here should still be taken seriously by philosophers and scholars of literature.
English Literature in Transition 1880 1920, 1991
Book Reviews Carpenter was an exemplary figure in the transition between Victorianism and Modernism. Forster implies in his frequently cited Terminal Note to Maurice that, without his visit to Carpenter's rural home, Milthorpe, Maurice might not have been written: "It was the direct result of a visit[;] ... he was a believer in the Love of Comrades. ... It was this last aspect of him that attracted me in my loneliness. For a short time he seemed to hold the key to every trouble. ... I then returned to Harrogate. .. and immediately began to write Maurice." Elsewhere, Forster has written that it was Carpenter's personal presence that was essential to his impact: "It was the influence which used to be called magnetic, and which emanated from religious teachers and seers, it depended on contact and couldn't be written down on paper, and its effect was to increase one's vitality, so that one went away better able to do one's work."
Sex in Utopia: The Evolutionary Aestheticism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2018
What measures our distance above the beasts that perish consists in these three things-ethics, intellect, the sense of beauty.. .. On the third [our existing morality] lays no stress at all; and herein the new hedonism has its raison d'être. It is part of its mission to point out to humanity that literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, the beautifying of life by sound, and form, and word, and colour, are among the most important tasks of civilization.-Grant Allen, "The New Hedonism" (1894), p. 382 Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilization, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.-Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist" (1890, rev. 1891), p. 204 IN HIS PROVOCATIVE POLEMIC "The New Hedonism," Grant Allen mounts a passionate defense of fin-de-siècle aestheticism by proposing a modern ethic-the titular "new hedonism," which he borrows from Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, rev. 1891)-that fully synthesizes aestheticism's insights with up-to-date scientific knowledge. 1 At first glance, Allen seems an unexpected ally for Wilde, in part because few literary historians have explored the link between the two contemporaries. Many modern-day scholars of Allen's work (including Peter Morton, Bernard Lightman, William Greenslade, and Terence Rodgers) have tended to focus on his popular science writing, his elaborations on Herbert Spencer's evolutionary theories, and his controversial "New Woman" novels The Woman Who Did (1895) and The TypeWriter Girl (1897). 2 Those who do connect Allen and Wilde, such as Nick Freeman, often draw the relationship into focus through the two writers' shared interest in libertarian socialism rather than their overlapping philosophical and aesthetic concerns (111-28). Yet, as we can begin to see in the epigraphs, the association that Allen made between evolutionary progress and the "beautifying of life" echoes one of the most significant claims of Wilde's earlier, dialogic essay, "The Critic as Artist." "Aesthetics," Wilde's speaker, Gilbert, enthuses, "like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change" ("The Critic as Artist" 204).
‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2012
In Oscar Wilde's story, 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' (1887), a palm-reader leads a young man to believe he will commit a murder. By trusting that his palm encodes his fate, Arthur tries to act on that prediction, but only when he gives up trying does he fulfil his supposed destiny by drowning the hapless palm-reader himself. The story raises the broad question of whether action is possible, or whether, as Arthur imagines, 'we [are] no better than chessmen, moved by an unseen power'. In any case, Arthur's awareness of his own determination is itself problematic, for his active efforts at murder fail: as another Wilde character, Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) puts it, 'Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws'. 1 However, 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' also understands the problem of action as political: it stages a conflict between radicalism-rendered an ever-present but empty threat-and the comfortable milieu of upper-class life. Class war is the story's persistently marginal subtext. Arthur attends parties with 'violent Radicals' and 'eminent sceptics' whose radicalism is merely nominal. He later consults a 'Nihilist' who makes for him an explosive clock shaped like a figure of Liberty, yet this symbolically potent instrument of revolution makes only a tiny explosion, so its recipients (who Arthur is trying to murder) treat it as a decorative novelty. No one dwells on the implications of exploding a commodified Liberty, building a deep cynicism into the story's plot. 2 Arthur, unsurprisingly, feels 'bound to admit. .. that he had not the slightest interest in social questions, and simply wanted the explosive machine for a purely family matter', but the Nihilist is hardly more political, since he turns out to 'live entirely for [his] art', like any Wildean dandy. 3 Thus the story implies that if action is impossible, so is social reconfiguration, because the aesthetic appeal of objects absorbs the possibility of insurrection. 1. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. by Joseph Bristow, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Ian Small, 4 vols to date (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000-continuing), III, 253. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 2. I am grateful for discussion of the Liberty clock with Dustin Friedman and Renée Fox.
Authorship 3:2 (Autumn 2014)
This essay introduces the concept of “authorialism” to characterise the critical orientation that sees literary works primarily as actions on the part of their authors rather than as linguistic objects, using the early reception of Oscar Wilde’s works as a case study. It is argued that authorialism was the dominant tendency in 1875-1900 Anglophone criticism, and that it has characterised assessments of Wilde’s works to this day. The method has the advantage of finding coherence in literary works, which is useful in assessing matters of value; the textual features of Wilde’s writings, however, resist authorialist readings by not featuring the expected coherence.
Oscar Wilde: A Victorian Sage in a Modern Age, Antae, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June 2015), pp. 114-133.
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