Oscar Wilde

Catalog description

This course considers Oscar Wilde’s life and writings in the context of late-Victorian England, renowned as much for its scandalous challenges to the status quo as for its excessive concern for propriety. Wilde’s comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, his essay “The Decay of Lying,” and his novel The Picture ofDorian Gray, published to outrage and protest in 1890, will be investigated along with key currents in fin-de-siècle arts and culture, and Wilde’s infamous court trials.