Philosophical approaches to interpretation of oscar wilde

Abstract

Nineteenth-century readers of Wilde appreciated and sometimes condemned aspects of the philosophical thought in his creative and critical work. However, the notoriety of Wilde’s life and trial in the 1890s created a public image which overshadowed the philosophical references, allusions, and subtleties in his writing. In the first decades of the twentieth century, homophobia and cultural pudency obscured serious attention to Wilde by scholars and critics. By the middle of the century, Wilde’s thought attracted the attention of formalist critics who suggested the coherence of its philosophical foundations for aestheticism. With the explosion of new approaches to Wilde in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first, novel and sometimes contentious interpretations have emerged, for example, those which have emphasized queer theory, the Irishness of Wilde, as celebrity or performer for commodity culture, Wilde and psychoanalysis, and so on. There has never been as much critically various and astute reception of Wilde’s work as at present and among the important recent approaches is the revaluation of Wilde as an intellectual with serious philosophical interests. I will review some of the major moments in the recent construction of a philosophical Wilde, focusing on longer considerations of significant work by J.E. Chamberlin and Rodney Shewan in the 1970s and by Julia Prewitt Brown and Bruce Bashford in the 1990s.