{"id":513,"date":"2022-03-10T04:09:19","date_gmt":"2022-03-10T04:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/?p=513"},"modified":"2022-03-10T04:09:55","modified_gmt":"2022-03-10T04:09:55","slug":"who-is-oscar-wilde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/2022\/03\/10\/who-is-oscar-wilde\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Oscar (Wild)e?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Oscar Wilde was an Irish author and poet best known for his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). <\/em>He lived in Europe in the late 1800s and was a known spokesperson for the Aestheticism movement. The central idea of this movement was that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, without the need to communicate some hidden or deeper meaning to audiences. Throughout his lifetime, he was celebrated in some circles and satirized in others. He was criticized in part for his stance on Aestheticism but mainly because of his sexuality and the ways in which his art would reflect his lifestyle. Of course, this was an unjust and bigoted judgment to make but it, unfortunately, was the established norm in Europe at the time. He was imprisoned for two years under charges of indecency and\/or sodomy which were obviously directly related to his sexuality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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After reading a bit of his work and learning more about his life, I would not call Oscar Wilde’s writing very particularly “wild” but it is clear that for the time he was living in, his lifestyle would be considered “wild.” It seems like this discussion could use a little more separation between the work and the artist. This is something that Oscar Wilde believed in himself. While searching for more information about the controversies surrounding Wilde, I stumbled across some of his thoughts about criticism itself. In The Critic As Artist, <\/em>an essay by Oscar Wilde, he claims that “a critic should be taught to criticize a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.” If the literary critics (and society in general) of his time shared this viewpoint, the way history remembers Oscar Wilde and his works would be very different. I can’t say that is a view that I 100% agree with because we have no way of knowing how much overlap exists at any given moment between an artist’s personality and the creation of their art. However, it is possible that we may overestimate that overlap every now and then, especially when there is such an apparent difference between an artist’s lived experience and the style of some of their art.<\/span><\/p>\n

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– Tsion Teffera<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oscar Wilde was an Irish author and poet best known for his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). He lived in Europe in the late 1800s and was a known spokesperson for the Aestheticism movement. The central idea … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-welcome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":517,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/wild-things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}