OSCAR WILDE

Aesthetic movement/ Aestheticism = a cultural movement that spread as a reaction to the values embodied by the upper-middle classes in Europe, especially in France

Oscar Wilde wrote the manifesto of the aesthetic movement

Wilde perceived the artist as an alien in a materialistic world, he wrote only to please himself and was not concerned in communicating his theories to his fellow-beings.
His pursuit of beauty and fulfillment was the tragic act of a superior being inevitably turned into an outcast.

Decadence is a development of this aesthetic movement

exalts beauty itself

no pressure of a morality

search for what's beautiful and useless, regardless of profit and ugliness

what is important in a book is not the content but the form > a book is only well written or badly written

he spreads the importance of beauty in literature

A world of beauty > devotion to beauty as the essence of a different world and alternative to traditional values

refined form

appeal to all the senses to provoke pleasent sensations

Aestheticism and decadence shocked the Victorian values

Oscar Wilde is an anti-conformist hero who follows the cult of beauty and pursues his own pleasure, rebelling against Victorian morality and utilitarianism

there is still the lack of commitment > no educational finality

Sense of dissatisfaction, well expressed in Mallarmé > decadent poets are compared “an empire in its decadence”

= attempt to escape reality (industries, exploitation of the workers justified by the three pillars of society)

Dorian Gray is the perfect dandy because he takes narcissistic pleasure in contemplating his own beauty

he leads an extremely artificial kind of life

love for perverse effects, vision of sexuality > rebellion