![]() This concept of privileging one value over another is realized later in the century by Jacques Derrida, who acutely observes that ‘the suppositions of stable structures depends on the privileging of a fixed center or given origin’. Within these works we will begin to see how Wilde inverts the privileging of one aspect of a dichotomy over another, specifically by favouring surface over depth. ![]() The predominant focus will be on The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Ernest, his essays in Intentions The Critic as Artist and The Decay of Lying, and some reference will also be made to his posthumous work De Profundis. This dissertation aims to explore the works of Oscar Wilde through the dialectical dichotomy of depth and surface. It contends that the common ‘moral’ reading of Dorian Gray as a generic parabolic text is affliated to the Hebraic sentiments that dominated the Victorian period, while suggesting that to understand Wilde’s ‘aesthetic’ meaning, the antithetical Hellenic perspective is required. The argument also attempts to make sense of its mixed critical reception by proceeding from the premise that the text may be read disjunctively, between the opposing literary and cultural discourses introduced by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869), viz. In so doing, it argues for revised interpretations of the novel’s ‘moral,’ and of an ending so often understood as his retributive punishment for sinning. This paper builds on these established perspectives, but reframes and evaluates Dorian’s growth through a genre that expresses Wilde’s New Hellenism. Such readings of Dorian Gray are not new Clausson relates the story “to the novel of self-development” (343), while Murray describes Dorian’s life as “the growth, education and development of an exceptional youth, who through personalities, a book, a picture, is moulded or moulds himself, discovering himself what he believes in” (viii). As the term Bildungsroman implies, the theme of self-creation is the focus of this genre. This aesthetic philosophy expressed in his critical writing will serve, as it were, as the foundations of yet another genre – one that may provisionally be termed a Hellenic Bildungsroman. While this paper does not claim to have found the true genre of Dorian Gray, it proposes to read the text in conjunction with Wilde’s philosophy of art, i.e. ![]() According to Nils Clausson, the “two most favored candidates for the Dorian Gray’s controlling genre have remained fable and parable” – modes whose moral lesson would have been self-evident (341). ![]()
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