Oscar Wilde - Life and works, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica Oscar Wilde - Life and works e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! OSCAR WILDE was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a wealthy famous doctor, Sir William Wilde. Oscar was immediately recognised as a brilliant student and he went to study at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland's most prestigious university. In 1874 his excellent results won him a scholarship to continue his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, where studied Classics and again graduated brilliantly. He left for London where he composed poetry, publishing his first collection in 1881. The following year he left for a lecture tour in America, where he met such important American writers as Longfellow and Walt Whitman. Another lecture tour, this time in England and Ireland, helped Oscar to create a name for himself as a leading figure in the aesthetic movement. In 1884 he married a wealthy English woman, Constance Lloyd, who gave him two sons. He found employment as the editor of a women's magazine and entered a fruitful period of creativity. In 1890, he published his only novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, it was attacked as an immoral work, though Wilde defended himself in a preface to the work, stating that 'vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.' Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, was staged in February 1892. It was an immediate success with the public and critics alike and encouraged Wilde to devote himself to the theatre in the following years. His success was confirmed by a series of successful, satirical comedies, not without a vein of social criticism, including A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and his theatrical masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Sadly, in the moment of his greatest success and popularity in London, Oscar Wilde became involved in a legal case that would lead to his ruin. Wilde had an affair with the young Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father Lord Queensberry accused him of homosexuality —> which at the time was a criminal offence. Wilde decided, rather foolishly, to accuse Queensberry of libel and took him to court. Queensberry's lawyers defended their client by presenting evidence of Wilde's homosexuality, including passages from his works and his letters to Lord Alfred. The libel case against Queensberry was rejected, but now Wilde himself was put on trial for indecency and he was was sentenced to two-year imprisonment and hard labour. While in prison, he wrote the perform this along letter to Lord Douglas, which was published in 1905. When Wilde came out of prison in 1897, he was a broken man, saddened further by the fact that he had been abandoned by many friends and his wife. He lived in exile in France and wrote very little. His one significant production of this period was “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, which recounted his terrible prison experience. Oscar Wilde died alone in an hotel in Paris, on the 30th of November 1900, at just 46 years old. Wilde adopted the aesthetic ideal and he used to affirme “My life is like a work of art” —> He lived the double role of rebel and dandy. With the term dandy we mean a refined and elegant man who combined a strong taste for elegance and an attention to his appearance, clothes and style. The dandy often used this wit and spirit to shock other people and to unmask the absurdities of Victorian moralism. In the Preface to the “Picture of Dorian Gray”, he affirmed: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” —> In this way, he rejected the didacticism that had characterised Victorian novel in the first half of the century. The picture of Dorian Gray (1891) tells the story of a rich, beautiful young man. The novel is set in London, at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, young man, whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portrait. Under the influence of the brilliant but corrupt, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian throws himself into a life of pleasure. While the young man desires are satisfied including eternal youth, the signs of Is corruption don’t appear on Dorian, but on portrait. Dorian makes use of everybody, even letting people die because of his because of his insensitivity. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later, he wants to free himself of the portrait witness to his spiritual corruption and stab it but, doing so, he killed himself. In the very moment of Dorian’s death. The picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian’s face becomes wrinkled, and ugly. When the novel was published in 1890, it came as a shock for most Victorian readers, who believed that the purpose of art was education and moral enlightenment, as illustrated in the works by Charles Dickens and other traditional Victorian novels. However, notwithstanding its aesthetic declarations, the novel does teach a moral lesson in the end, as Dorian's sins and his hedonistic life lead to his own destruction. The point is that Dorian doesn't overtly defy bourgeois morality or make his life a manifesto of his ideas as Wilde's life was. —> His appearance remains beautiful and innocent, but he is not innocent and beautiful inside, as the portrait (his double, the dark side of his personality) witnesses. Instead, Dorian's double life is only a sign of his hypocrisy; he uses his innocent appearance to be accepted in society and also to fulfil his darkest desires without paying the consequences. As such, the novel ranks alongside “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” as a representation of how the literature of the period explored Victorian society and the forbidden desires behind acceptable public faces. It is also one of the most emblematic and iconic interpretations of the intrinsic duality of the Victorian Age, split betwen a facade of pleasant respectability and progress, and an unspoken dimension pervaded by superficiality, exploitation, and degradation. In this sense, the story is profoundly allegorical. It is a 19th century version of the legend of the story of Faust —> a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In the novel, the soul is the picture which records the signs of time, the corruption, the horror, and the sins hidden under the mask of Dorian timeless beauty. The picture represents the darkest side of Dorian personality, which tries to forget by locking in a room. The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and there is no escape from reality. When Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, there is death. The horrible and corrupted picture could be seen as symbol of the morality and conscience of the Victorian middle-class, while Dorian’s pure, innocent