Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Oscar wildes influences on dorian gray
Oscar wildes influences on dorian gray
Wilde Essay The Importance
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Oscar wildes influences on dorian gray
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854 to his father, Sir William Wilde, and his mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, in Dublin, Ireland. Jane Francesca Elgee was a poet and a journalist who inspired Oscar Wilde to follow in her path to a very successful career as a playwright, novelist, poet, and critic in literature. Wilde is more famously known for his comedies in which he used epigrams, which is the use of short poems to express ones feelings in a play. This made the audience to think harder allowing them to understand what the characters were truly feeling.. Wilde’s career is greatly admired for the major contribution of epigrams and many of his famous quotes.
The start of Wilde’s career really began in the years he was enrolled at Magdalen College in Oxford. One of his successful pieces was named Ravenna, a poem which received the prestigious 1878 Newdigate Prize (The Poetry Foundation). In 1879 Wilde settled down in London where, two years later, he published his first book called Poems. This was a collection of some of his poems that had already been published elsewhere (The Poetry Foundation). Wilde’s career had already taken huge strides to success, but when he married Constance Lloyd in 1884, he had no choice but to accept a job at Woman’s World magazine (Brdnik). This job helped Oscar Wilde support his wife and two children at home. While employed at Woman’s World magazine,Wilde edited and submitted other people’s work before publishing it. This lead to the publishing of his one and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891 (Brdnik). This novel did not receive such great success from the public for having strong homosexual overtones. That same year, Wilde was caught with having an affair with ...
... middle of paper ...
...ays which used his famous epigrams will be a stepping stone in world drama for years to come. The comedies will show how much work was put into making his works. Wilde will always be remembered for his contribution of epigrams. Future playwrights will be inspired by Wilde’s cockiness and his witty words throughout his plays and help them become better known.
Work Cited
Brdnik, G.. N.p.. Web. 13 Dec 2013. .
"Oscar Wilde's Epigrammatic Theater." Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces. New York University
Library System. Web. 13 Dec 2013. .
The Poetry Foundation, . N.p.. Web. 13 Dec 2013.
.
Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. n.d. n. page.
.
Guy, Josephine M. "Self-Plagiarism, Creativity and Craftsmanship in Oscar Wilde." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 41, no. 1, Jan. 1998, pp. 6-23.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray; For Love of the King. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993.
Foster, Richard. A. A. “Wilde as Parodist: A Second Look at The Importance of Being Earnest” In College English, Vol. 18, No. 1 -. 1, October, 1956: pp. 113-114. 18-23.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a rich story which can be viewed through many literary and cultural lenses. Oscar Wilde himself purposefully filled his novel with a great many direct and indirect allusions to the literary culture of his times, so it seems appropriate to look back at his story - both the novel and the 1945 film version - in this way.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Peter Raby, ed. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1995. 247-307.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Michael Patrick Gillespie, Editor. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.
Ruddick, Nicholas. "'The Peculiar Quality of My Genius': Degeneration, Decadence, and Dorian Gray in 1890-91." Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World. New York: AMS, 2003. 125-37. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 164. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.
Pearson, Hesketh. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. 3rd ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.
"I turned half way around and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself" (7). During the Victorian era, this was a dangerous quote. The Victorian era was about progress. It was an attempt aimed at cleaning up the society and setting a moral standard. The Victorian era was a time of relative peace and economic stability (Marshall 783). Victorians did not want anything "unclean" or "unacceptable" to interfere with their idea of perfection. Therefore, this quote, taken from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, brimming with homosexual undertones, was considered inappropriate. Due to the time period's standards, Oscar Wilde was forced to hide behind a thin layer of inference and parallel. Wilde was obsessed with the perfect image. Although he dressed more flamboyantly than the contemporary dress, it was to create an image of himself. Wilde was terrified of revealing his homosexuality because he knew that he would be alienated and ostracized from the society. Through his works, Oscar Wilde implicitly reflected his homosexual lifestyle because he feared the repercussions from the conservative Victorian era in which he lived.
Oscar Wilde was born in October 16, 1854, in the mid era of the Victorian period—which was when Queen Victoria ruled. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901.While she ruined Britain, the nation rise than never before, and no one thought that she was capable of doing that. “The Victorian era was both good and bad due to the rise and fall of the empires and many pointless wars were fought. During that time, culture and technology improved greatly” (Anne Shepherd, “Overview of the Victorian Era”). During this time period of English, England was facing countless major changes, in the way people lived and thought during this era. Today, Victorian society is mostly known as practicing strict religious or moral behavior, authoritarian, preoccupied with the way they look and being respectable. They were extremely harsh in discipline and order at all times. Determination became a usual Victorian quality, and was part of Victorian lifestyle such as religion, literature and human behavior. However, Victorian has its perks, for example they were biased, contradictory, pretense, they cared a lot of about what economic or social rank a person is, and people were not allowed to express their sexuality. Oscar Wilde was seen as an icon of the Victorian age. In his plays and writings, he uses wit, intelligence and humor. Because of his sexuality he suffered substantially the humiliation and embarrassment of imprisonment. He was married and had an affair with a man, which back then was an act of vulgarity and grossness. But, that was not what Oscar Wilde was only known for; he is remembered for criticizing the social life of the Victorian era, his wit and his amazing skills of writing. Oscar Wilde poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” typifies the Vi...
Wilde, O. (1945). The picture of Dorian Gray. The Electronic Classics Series, The Pennsylvania State University. p. 3/ Retrieved January 3, 2014 from http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/oscar-wilde/dorian-gray.pdf
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) is a central figure in aesthetic writing. Wilde was a poet, fiction writer, essayist and editor. In the opening scenes of the movie Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes suggested that Wilde was one of the first pop idols. Oscar Wilde is often seen as a homosexual icon although as many men of his day he was also a husband and father. Wilde’s life ended at odds with Victorian morals that surrounded him. He died in exile.
Woodcock, George. The Paradox of Oscar Wilde. London-New York: T.V. Boardman and Co., Ltd., 1950.
Set in the late 19th Century, Oscar Wilde wrote his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is a story about debauchery and corruption of innocence and well known as a "Gothic melodrama." Violent twists and a sneaky plot make this novel a distinct reflection of human pride and corrupt nature.
Wilde, Oscar, and Michael Patrick. Gillespie. The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2007. Print.