Oscar Wilde

Catalog description

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age, Oscar Wilde once announced in a characteristically immodest, yet accurate, appraisal of his talent. With his legendary wit, his exuberant style of perversity and paradox, and his tendency to scandal, he has come to stand in symbolic relation to our own age as well, and for some of the same reasons he was a delight and a challenge to the Victorians. We will explore his poetry, essays, plays, letters, and fiction, in the context of the Aesthetic, Decadent, and Symbolist movements of the late-nineteenth century and also in the context of current debates in literary criticism and the history of sexuality.