Abstract
Due to the multifarious influences he was exposed to as a man and as an artist, Oscar Wilde’s work, so closely tracing the tenets of the Romantic and Post-Romantic heritage, at the same time anticipates some features attributed to Modernism and Postmodernism. Wilde’s concepts are indebted to the Keatsian theory of impersonality and aesthetic appreciation based on sensations, simultaneously denoting a transition from Coleridge and Keats to the Baudelairean predilection not only for art but also for the artificial. Conversely, in a Modernist manner, Wilde in his literary output withdraws from society and avoids worldly, mundane knowledge, devoid of spirituality. Finally, he is primarily concerned with the linguistic artifact itself, with the game forming a bridge between Modernism and Postmodernism, where paradox, the comic device corresponding to the theme of dual personality, stirs the clichés of the current statements into a novel meaning.
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Notes
- 1.
The statement, used as an ideology of l’art pour l’art by Théophile Gautier in the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1835 (1981, p. 35), was also applied by Edgar Allan Poe in his “The Poetic Principle” where he puts forward the idea that “under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem’s sake” (Poe, 2003, p. 454).
- 2.
At this point it is essential to state that such concepts as (1) the relation of beauty to truth, (2) human moral conscience, (3) predilection for art and, in consequence, (4) for the artificial, (5) paradoxical subversion of the presented idea, cannot be simplistically typecast as Romantic (1) and (2); Post-Romantic (1), (2) and (3); Decadent (3) and (4); pre-Modernist (3) and (5); or pre-Postmodernist (4) and (5), as they point progressively at the combination of the characteristics of all these periods.
- 3.
As already stated, Aestheticism in Britain was, as it were, a counterpart of French Symbolism, but despite numerous overlaps and parallels, the two terms, as well as the phenomena they represent, are not entirely identical, and this is why some distinctions, however subtle they are, have to be pointed out.
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Pestka, D. (2018). Oscar Wilde’s Travelling Across Time: In the Wake of the Romantic Heritage, Anticipating Modernism and Postmodernism. In: Lipski, J. (eds) Travel and Identity: Studies in Literature, Culture and Language. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74021-8_8
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