When Wilde turned to the writing of social comedy, he made deliberate use of the theatrical conventions of his day but introduced a quality of epigrammatic wit, paradox, and irony that had not been seen in such brilliant profusion on the London stage since the late-eighteenth-century comedies of Richard Sheridan.
Though Wilde is known today primarily as a playwright and as author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)—his only novel—he also wrote poetry, fairy tales, essays, and criticism, all of which express his aesthetic approach to life and art. Indeed, he was the most articulate and popular spokesman in the late nineteenth century advocating the doctrine of aestheticism, which insisted that art should be primarily concerned with "art for art's sake," not with politics, religion, science, bourgeois morality, or other intrusions. "All art," he said, "is quite useless," a view denying any utilitarian function that could be pressed upon art, since its appeal was fundamentally aesthetic. Such ideas had, of course, been current in France ever since Theophile Gautier's famous introduction to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), but Wilde expressed them with striking wit and a daring designed to startle readers.
This is a free page. This page contains 167 words. This
biography contains 9,914 words (approx. 33 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde Access Pass.
