Fin du globe
Oscar Wilde's romance with decadence and the idea of world literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4966640 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Harald Pittel (0000-0002-7456-2327, University of Potsdam, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 162 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 121-136 |
| Publication date | 2021-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Thesis Eleven (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0725513621994702 |
| OpenAlex | W3131060655 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 13 |
This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and 'between the lines' of his major critical essays. Wilde's implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around 'decadence' in art and literature. More specifically, the arch-aesthete preferred to use the word 'romance' rather than 'decadence' (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the 'love of things impossible'. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde's thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism
Aestheticism · Aesthetics · Alterity · Apotheosis · Art · Cosmopolitanism · Decadence · Epistemology · Literature · Pejorative · Politics · Romance · World literature · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature
Marxism and literature
The Pity of Partition
What Is World Literature?
Anatomy of Criticism
The Communist Manifesto
Individualism, Decadence and Globalization
Fictions of British Decadence
Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner
The Vulgarization of Art
The Global Circulation of the Literatures of Decadence
Fin du Globe
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |