“A Form of Reverie, a Malady of Dreaming”: Dorian Gray, Personality, and Mass Culture

2018 ◽  
pp. 166-206
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
Textual History ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
New Community ◽  
Key Terms

How does one fashion an authentic self out of mass-produced ideas, styles, and materials? Chapter five assesses a tremendously influential, extended answer to this question, Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Building on recent work linking the novel to new nineteenth-century media such as photography and cinema, the chapter interprets Dorian Gray as caught in the mass media consumer’s dilemma. Two key terms govern this dilemma, reverie and personality. Wilde represented Dorian’s reverie as an embodied, material activity of self-fashioning through mass print culture. Dorian then re-circulates the cultural information he has consumed in the form of his personality, a signature term in Wilde’s writings, a revitalized concept in mass culture and psychology at the century’s end, and a word tied to the novel’s textual history of gay censorship. Prevented from representing gay desire as clearly in the book edition as he had in the Lippincott’s version, Wilde published a novel full of queerly coded signs that nevertheless assembled a new community within its mass readership.

scholarly journals Art, the Artist and Ethics in Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Zrinka Frleta
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Art And Ethics

This paper examines ideological and philosophical premises of aestheticism, presented in Wilde's critical essays (The Critic as Artist and The Decay of Lying), and epigrams in the preface to the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which both offer a philosophical context to the novel. Aestheticism emphasized that art can not be subordinated to moral, social, religious and didactic goals, because its ultimate goal is art itself, l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake). „Art never expresses anything but itself.“ „All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.“ „Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.“ „Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.“ (Wilde, 1891). The relations between art and reality (concealment of reality) and art and ethics (an ethical function of art) have been explored through the interaction of the characters of Basil Hallward and Sibyl Vane with Dorian Gray. The paper also examines the role of the artist, his morality in the process of creating and experiencing the work, and the influence of the work of art on the artist himself/herself.

PRINT CULTURE AND ITS PUBLICS: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF BOOKSTORES IN TEHRAN, 1900–1950

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Afshin Marashi
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article investigates the evolution of print culture and commerce in Tehran during the first half of the 20th century. The first section examines technological changes that facilitated the commercialization of texts and then details the history of early print entrepreneurs in the Tehran bazaar. The second section examines the expansion of the book trade between the 1920s and 1940s, tracing the emergence of modern bookstores in a rapidly changing Tehran. I argue that patterns of change in print commerce between 1900 and 1950 contributed to the emergence of mass culture by midcentury. This new mass culture involved the social and political empowerment of a diversity of new reading publics in the city, and enabled the emergence of new forms of popular politics.

‘[C]allee me Oscar’: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aestheticism, and Opium

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-87
Author(s):  
Ya-feng Wu
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
East End ◽  
House Beautiful ◽  
To Receive

Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), one of the flagship novels of Aestheticism, contains an intricate opium narrative that has yet to receive adequate critical attention. The novel consists of two nested units: the House Beautiful that subsumes a Gothic nursery where Dorian's portrait is placed, and London the Metropolis that harbours Blue Gate Fields in the East End. The former might be read as a miniature of the latter. This double mechanism hinges on a Chinese box in which opium is stored. The structure, which evolves from the classic opium narrative established by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), enables Wilde to stage a critique on the connection between Aestheticism and the imperial trade of opium. Besides, Wilde's aesthete trio in the novel, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray, and Adrian Singleton, are cast as opium smokers in order to disrupt the imperialist mindset showcased in the cartoons appearing on trade cards and in magazines that satirise Wilde's promotion of Aestheticism. This essay contends that Wilde's opium narrative exposes the hypocrisy of Empire by demonstrating that the coloniser and the colonised are anamorphic reflections of each other.

scholarly journals Linguistic constructions of appraisal in the novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray and its Brazilian translation and adaptations: an exploratory analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 259-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adail Sebastião Rodrigues-Júnior ◽  
Leila Barbara
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Exploratory Analysis ◽  
Original Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Software Program ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Literary Characters ◽  
Verbal Processes

This paper aims to investigate how the linguistic elements of appraisal construe the evaluative representations of (gay) literary characters in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and in its Brazilian translation and adaptations. The centrality of the investigation is the narrator's voice, imprinted in the projecting verbal processes and the content of the message that constitute either the narrative point of view or the dialogues performed by the characters. To pursue this objective, we have adopted Martin's and White's (2005) appraisal model, employed to uncover linguistic resources that express attitudes towards events and people, with more or less intensity or graduation, and with different forms of commitment or engagement. The software program WordSmith Tools, more specifically the Aligner utility, served as the basis for selecting and organizing some extracts of the original novel comparatively with the same extracts of the translation and adaptations. The analyses have indicated that the narrator offered the vast majority of evaluative descriptions of femininity, which points to the importance of narrative point of view for the construing of the plot and for the establishment of ideological standpoints. The discussion has also shown several differences of evaluative linguistic choices in the translation and adaptations when compared to the original, demonstrating that the corpora do not fall within the boundaries of a strict linguistic correspondence, but rather within the limits of text recreation or rewriting.

scholarly journals If Looks Could Kill: Looking through the Artist’s Lenses in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdelfattah Ali Ghazel
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Normative Values ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
The Relationship

This paper investigates aestheticism and authorship in the Oscar Wilde’s only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Victorian literature is usually read against the relationship between art and reality. The literary merit of a book is determined by the degree of its conformity with the moral values of the time. This paper offers a detached reading of the novel where the value of the book is found in its ability to initiate the reader into an aesthetic world. The research argues that Wilde fragments the act of artistic creation among the artist (the painter Basil), the sitter (Dorian Gray) and the audience (Lord Henry Wotton). This fragmentation renders the novel aesthetically autonomous from its reality. Aesthetic autonomy contributes to the debate of morality in Victorian literature by placing the work of art in an alternative sphere where normative values cease to apply.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Wilde
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
East End

‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay. Ever since its first publication in 1890 Wilde's only novel has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. Combining elements of the supernatural, aestheticism, and the Gothic, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an unclassifiable and uniquely unsettling work of fiction.

Strange Legacies of Thought and Passion

2018 ◽  
pp. 142-170
Author(s):  
Laura Helen Marks
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Sexual History ◽  
Sexual Subjectivity ◽  
Aids Pandemic ◽  
Pornographic Film ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Meanwhile, adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s queer classic The Picture of Dorian Gray extend and elaborate on explorations of the double by explicitly invoking histories of sexual representation in connection to the sensual qualities of technology and nostalgia. In chapter 5, “`Strange Legacies of Thought and Passion’: Technologies of the Flesh and the Queering Effect of Dorian Gray,” I continue my analysis of the relationship between pornography, legacy, doubles, and technology through a close examination of two films based on Wilde’s novel: Take Off (1976) and Gluttony (2001). More than any other text, Dorian Gray engenders pornographic engagement with erotic legacy and the role of technology in the erotics of representation. Like Wilde’s novel, these films interrogate beauty and mortality, haunted at the margins by Wilde’s tragic fate and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Drawing on Wilde’s magic portrait as a predecessor, Take Off and Gluttony ruminate on mortality and relate it to the sensual, tactile qualities of evolving, mobile visual technologies and the role these technologies play in sexual subjectivity. Pornographic film, Weston and West suggest, is the inheritor to Wilde’s portrait. Both films draw on Wilde’s tale in order to address the media on which the self is captured, the shifting technologies used to exhibit this self, and the relationship of technology and media to the corporeal body. Through their reimagining of histories of Hollywood and pornographic film, respectively, Take Off and Gluttony signal the affective relationship between technology, pornography, decay, and popular culture, tracing a hardcore sexual history of the self that constitutes a sexual lineage.

scholarly journals Wilde’s Language Style in The Picture of Dorian Gray

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Fang Yang
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Language Style ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde, a famous Irish Aestheitc Writer, is well-known for the humourous language in his works. As the “lord of language”, he deliberately utilizes English as a tool to show the beauty of the language itself. His only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray commendably reveals Wilde’s talent in language organizing. This paper outlines Wilde’s employing witty rhetorical devices, the harmonious diction, brilliant paradoxes, jocular dialogues and witty epigrams to help readers perceive that succinctness, vividness, impressiveness and meaningfulness form the most important features of the writing style of the novel.

Fitzgerald: the Tissue of Style

1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Donald Monk
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray

Printed as poetry this representative passage from Fitzgerald's first novel differs from the post-1915 debasement of Imagism (what Ezra Pound called ‘Amygism’) in only two significant aspects: it has a higher incidence of rhyme and is, if possible, even more devoid of content. Its voice defines the novel's protagonist, Amory Blaine, much more memorably than do his character and actions. Derived from the vaguely erotic style Pater developed in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and popularized by Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), this verbal swoon, made over into a Princeton accent, places Fitzgerald in the Romantic Decadence. Its derivative quality should not, however, blind us to the work it entailed for Fitzgerald, accumulating these inter-echoes during the re-writings of the novel.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document