Oscar Wilde: The Life and Literature of a Radical Aesthete, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Oscar Wilde: The Life and Literature of a Radical Aesthete e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! OSCAR WILDE Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) embodies the Aesthetic movement. He was born in Dublin by a wealthy Protestant family; he attended the college in Dublin and then Oxford, where he was the most brilliant student (in fact he was admired), following the lectures of the most important members of the Aesthetic movement, Ruskin and Pater. He led an intense and spectacular social life, and adopted extravagant poses that made him famous. He was then accused of homosexual practices and was imprisoned for two years; when he was released he was poor and unknown. He was a dandy.His first book was a collection of fai-rytales, “The happy prince and other tales”. He became famous with his theatre comedies (such as “The importance of being Earnest”), which are comedies of manners and portrait the superficiality of the time, challenging the Victorian moral code with witty and cynic dia-logues. His most famous work is “The portrait of Dorian Gray” THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY The novel is set in London in the 19th century. The protagonist is Dorian Grey,a young man whose beauty led the painter Basil Hallward to paint his portrait. Dorian throws himself into a life of pleasure. The signs of age don’t appear on Dorian but in the portrait. Dorian ma-kes use of everybody and when the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, do-rian kills him. At the end Dorian, wanting to free himself from the portrait, kills himself. Dorian represents the ideal of youth and beauty and the portrayal represents a degradation of his soul, the darkness in himself. Wotton is an intellectual, very sharp in his criticism of in-stitutions: he influences Dorian. Hallward is an intellectual who falls in love with Dorian’s beauty: he represents a sad example of how a hood artist can be destroyed in a sacrifice for art. The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and there’s no esca-pe from reality. The corrupted picture is the symbol of the immortality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class. In this novel, there’s the theme of dualism and even the contrast of art-life; in the end, the portrait lives and the human body dies, so there’s the triumph of art over human life. Art is eternal. Dorian’s death can also mean that nobody can live among pleasures and crimes without moral implications, because in the end he has to pay for his sins.-unobtrusive third person narrator,- internal prospective;- Setting described with senses