Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Riddell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, essayist, author and poet, and one of Victorian England’s chief proponents of Aestheticism. His works are often characterised by the use of humorous paradox, which questions Victorian certainties of truth, value and morality. Wilde is best known today for his play The Importance of Being Earnest (1894), his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) and his imprisonment in 1895 on grounds of ‘gross indecency’ after a series of scandalous trials. Individualism is central to Wilde’s philosophy, and many of his works challenge or ironise social conventions that seek to limit autonomy of personal expression. Wilde prefigures the concerns of much twentieth-century Modernist literature in his critique of Realism, his scepticism regarding authentic selfhood and his often absurd dramatic mode. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854, the son of upper-middle class Anglo-Irish intellectuals. His earliest education was at the staunchly Protestant Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, before he progressed to Trinity College, Dublin in 1871. Wilde excelled as a student of Greek, and in 1874 was awarded a scholarship to read Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. Here he was influenced by aesthetic theorists Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Having graduated with a double first, Wilde settled in London in 1879, where he soon set about cultivating an image as an aesthete and dandy.

Art and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

Ein anderer Pygmalion – Techniken der Kunstbelebung in Joseph von Eichendorffs Das Marmorbild, Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray und Georg Heyms Der Dieb

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Genz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Main Issue ◽  
Crucial Point ◽  
Joseph Von Eichendorff ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Narrative Techniques

AbstractThe main issue of the Pygmalion myth is the vitalisation of an artificial woman. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses it is motivated by the intervention of Venus. This article deals with Pygmalion-like protagonists since 1800, in which the crucial point of vitalisation is no longer based on divine volition but on semiotic theories that Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe and others used in the eighteenth century. In these cases, the protagonist’s perspective gives rise to the impression of vivification. The examples of Joseph von Eichendorff, Oscar Wilde and Georg Heym show that this shift also had an impact on the narrative techniques, for their concreteness allows the reader to retrace the vivification of the figures himself. In the twentieth century Georg Heym modernised the techniques of the eighteenth century by connecting them with associations of the new medium film. In the course of time the pygmalionic observer turns into a pygmalionic narrator, whose narration obtains with the aid of the reader an enormous vitality.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Early Schooling

The Introduction begins with a succinct factual account of Wilde’s classical ‘biography’, from his childhood and early schooling, through his years as a student at Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, to his later literary success. It explains the novelty of, and the cause for, the broad interdisciplinary approach taken in this book, and argues that the contributed essays, dealing in multifaceted but complementary ways, add significantly to modern Wildean scholarship. The Introduction is intended as a guide to the themes covered in this collection and the links which unite them in their mission. It argues that Wilde’s classicism was crucial to his self-creation, to his taking control of his own myth, and that one of the most striking aspects of his classicism was his commoditization of the ancient world, his use of it in literary ‘products’ designed to be consumed by large middle-class audiences.

Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Point Of Departure

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.

Racine Lighting Beckett

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-242
Author(s):  
Cal Revely-Calder
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The Trinity

Critics have recently begun to pay attention to the influence Jean Racine's plays had on the work of Samuel Beckett, noting his 1930–31 lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and echoes of Racine in early texts such as Murphy (1938). This essay suggests that as well as the Trinity lectures, Beckett's later re-reading of Racine (in 1956) can be seen as fundamentally influential on his drama. There are moments of direct allusion to Racine's work, as in Oh les beaux jours (1963), where the echoes are easily discernible; but I suggest that soon, in particular with Come and Go (1965), the characteristics of a distinctly Racinian stagecraft become more subtly apparent, in what Danièle de Ruyter has called ‘choix plus spécifiquement théâtraux’: pared-down lighting, carefully-crafted entries and exits, and visual tableaux made increasingly difficult to read. Through an account of Racine's dramaturgy, and the ways in which he structures bodily motion and theatrical talk, I suggest that Beckett's post-1956 drama can be better understood, as stage-spectacles, in the light of Racine's plays; both writers give us, in Myriam Jeantroux's phrase, the complicated spectacle of ‘un lieu à la fois désert et clôturé’. As spectators to Beckett's drama, by keeping Racine in mind we can come to understand better the limitations of that spectatorship, and how the later plays trouble our ability to see – and interpret – the figures that move before us.

Are We Doing Diversity Justice? A Critical Exchange

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi ◽  
Emma Penney
Keyword(s):  
Trinity College ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Race Analysis

This critical exchange is based on a conversation between the authors which took place during the Irish University Review Roundtable Discussion: Displacing the Canon (2019 IASIL Conference, Trinity College Dublin). As authors we give first-hand accounts of our experience writing, editing, and teaching in Ireland, attempting to draw out concerns we have for the future of Irish literature and Irish Studies that specifically relate to race. The conversation here suggests that race directly impacts what we consider valuable in our literary culture. We both insist on decentring universalism as a governing literary critical concept and insist on the urgent application of critical race analysis to the construction of literary value systems in Ireland.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Poetry and Science: William Wordsworth and his Irish Friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth, c. 1829

Romanticism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Yen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The Relationship

Through hitherto neglected manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Library, and the Wordsworth Trust, this paper explores the relationship between William Wordsworth and his Irish friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth around 1829. It details the debates about poetry and science between Hamilton (Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland) and Edgeworth (the novelist Maria Edgeworth's half-brother), in which Wordsworth was embroiled when he visited Ireland in the autumn of 1829. By examining a variety of documents including letters, poems, lectures, and memoirs, a fragment of literary history may be restored and a clearer understanding may be reached of the tensions between poetry and science in Wordsworth's poetry, particularly in The Excursion, and of the Irish provenance of a memorable passage in ‘On the Power of Sound’.

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