The history of Oscar Wilde

Abstract

This thesis provides the first systematic study of history in the work of Oscar Wilde. It places his fiction, drama, and poetry in dialogue with eighteenth and nineteenth-century historiography and philosophy, arguing that Wilde had a sustained interest in the debates arising from these intellectual contexts. Chapter One looks at nascent historical explorations, reading two poems, ‘The Burden of Itys’ and ‘Charmides’, in dialogue with the idealist hellenic and platonic frameworks of Matthew Arnold and Benjamin Jowett. Chapter Two examines Wilde’s perspective on the possibility of writing literary history through ‘The Incomparable and Ingenious History of Mr. W.H.’ It looks at Wilde’s interest in nineteenth-century studies of Shakespeare, which pursued more rationalist understandings of literary criticism, and how these can be measured against an idealist, Paterian concept of artistic interpretation and historical truth. Chapter Three studies a selection of the Fairy Tales in order to further explore Idealism as a historical model. It calls into question materialist modes of individual progress such as found in the work of Herbert Spencer, instead drawing on German Romantic concepts of individual development to better understand and narrate human progress. Chapter Four solidifies the centrality of Victorian historical-philosophical debates to Wilde’s aesthetic practices by reading his play Salome as a contemplation on the complexity of acquiring complete historical affirmation. In particular, how rationalist approaches to biblical historiography during the Victorian period raised questions about the critical ability to uncover the truth of the religious past. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates Wilde’s arrival at a philosophy of history that destabilises definitions of the past as a fixed state and reconfigures it as a mode of multifaceted and perpetual experience. This project therefore revaluates Wilde’s interest in history as a primarily hermeneutical endeavour concerned with both the epistemological problems and possibilities of conceptualising the past.

Date of Award	Dec 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium
Supervisor	Alex Murray (Supervisor) & Caroline Sumpter (Supervisor)