Oscar Wilde’s Essay

The following evidence entrust examine British Literature in two passel the first innovation that of Oscar Wildes contribution to British Literature and the minute being feminism in British Literature in the 1800s and on. It is hoped that focusing on two separate but entangled subjects will make the paper more accessible and therefore broader in setting and understanding of the reader to British Literature. Peacocks and SunflowersOscar Wildes Immoral Aestheticism as an fountain from Reality into the Realm of BeautyGilbert, the authors alter ego in Oscar Wildes essay The Critic as Artist (originally print in 1888) declared that all art is immoral (274), and that phrase turned into a manifesto for the immoral aestheticism doctrine of the famous dandy who decorated popu latish with peacock feathers and showed in public with a sunflower in the buttonhole. The writer was condemned by contemporaries as a breacher of tight-laced moral ardor of living but justified by successors .As Ellmann explains, sin is more utile to society than martyrdom, since it is self-expressive not self-repressive and thus contributes more significantly to the acute terminus of the liberation of the someoneality (Ellmann 310). The man who used to be convicted of the offence of vernacular indecency is praised now as an icon of decadent and unexampledist style, a new in aesthetics and ethics, and a prophet of beauty which is above and after-school(prenominal) any boundaries. The concept of art and beauty as abstract notions being unrelated to the narrowly dichotomous morals takes a key built in bed in Wildes oeuvre.Todays connoisseurs are never shopworn in their coining of appropriate definitions for the writers aesthetic programme. Gillespie, one of the most(prenominal) important exploreers of Wildes legacy, viewed it as consisting of paradoxical gestures which delineate an aesthetic that celebrates the pulse rate to integrate, amalgamate, and conjoin rather than sepa rate, dissipate, or disperse (37). Although the writer was aware of the enceinte weird dangers convolute in a conduct of immoral put to death and experiment (Pearce 164), he underlined the right of an artist to be immoral for the pursuit of eternal beauty.In his aestheticism, Wilde was an admirer and disciple of essayist and art critic Walter Horatio Pater with the latters emphasis on the esthete as a novel kind of being (Murphy 1992 Wood 2002). He was also immersed into the late 19th century cultural milieu as being involved into a polylogue on the topics of art, artist, ethics, and beauty which resulted in the emergence of Decadence and modernism (Bell 1997). Altogether with the English fin de siecle men of art such as A. C.Swinburne, Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Christopher Dowson, George Moore Symons, and D. G. Rossetti, Wilde researched the concept of aesthetics as being constructed by a person who was proud of his non- go badicipation in ethical controversy (Wo odcock 53) and thus freed from the restrictions imposed by society and common law. Oscar Wildes immoral aestheticism as an integral part of the decadent and early modernist styles is what the present purpose attempts to look at.It will research Wildes critical and fictional legacy in regard to ideas and concepts as pertinent to the new understanding of relationship amidst art and morals. This proposal attempts to re-examine Oscar Wilde as a theorist of the novel aesthetics, establishing a draw between the writer and other theorists and critics to prove that the call for immoral aestheticism was a brilliant attempt to overcome the boredom of reality and enter the world of absolute beauty.Modern Womens Voices Sexual Subjectivity in the texts of squeamish and contemporary British women writers Feminism is still one of the most prevalent critical lenses to zoom into details of history of literature and social life (Brennan 2002 Jackson 1998 Kemp 1997 Scott 1996), and it is proven t o be useful within the framework of the habituated proposal aimed at tracing the common and differentiating points of the two critical finishs of British literature.I am e specificly interested in the late Victorian epoch with its rise of independent womens suffragist voices and the latest period with its variety of tones and melodies composed by women writers amidst the turmoil of free speech and re-thinking of common sexual urge values such as career, family, child-rearing, and gender relationships. The novels chosen are The bill of a Modern fair sex by Ella Hepworth Dixon (1894), Anna Lombard by Victoria blow (the pseudonym of Annie Sophie Cory1901), Foreign Parts by Janice Galloway (1994) and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding (2004).The earlier and later books are divided by well-nigh a century but despite a temporal remoteness there are common motives and aspirations which approximate the Victorian New Woman and a modern British female as de picted in fiction. The womens liberationist movement of the late Victorian period was pre-conditioned by more factors which made the trend not accidental but seriously grounded in the wider social context being permeated by patriarchal ascendance and rigidity of social structure (Bernstein 1997 Lewis and Ardis 2003).The New Women movement that acquired much power during the period from the late 1890s to roughly 1915 featured a range of opinions concerning the heightened post of a female in a modern society (Walls 2002 Mitchell 1999). As Ardis (1990) observed, Dixon went farther than her colleagues in asserting the preciousness and independency of a charwoman as a self-sustaining creature (see also Fehlbaum 2005), whereas Crosss Anna Lombard represents another type of the late Victorian womanhood as sacrificing her desires and aspirations for the rice beer of the traditional familial institution.The most recent books by Galloway and Fielding cannot be straight-forwardly labeled a s feminist writing, although they utilise some stylistic elements of feminist narration (Greene 1991). Whereas Galloway vividly portrays contemporary women as being able to make outside the patriarchic framework but provides no answer to the caput about the appropriateness of such life style, Fielding is often criticised for the attempts to line up consensus with a mens world and, therefore, to abandon the programme of modern Amazons (Marsh 2004).Anyhow, both contemporary British women of letters share specific ideas concerning paper and the interplay between feminist and non-feminist traditions to the extent that they can be seen as spiritual sisters of their Victorian predecessors. Being equipped with solid theoretical instruments from gender studies and psychological science (e. g. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory) to conceptualise the evolution of womanhood and gendered selves in Great Britain end-to-end a century, I hope to establish a link between late Victorian and recent womens writings with a special emphasis on the literary features of the female novel. The freshness of the proposal is in the choice of research objects (all the four novels are not enough extensively discussed by academic critics) and the carrying of analysis within the theoretical framework concerning composition that was proposed by a Russian scholar Michael Bakhtin.