In her seminal study Idylls of the Marketplace. Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public Regenia Gagnier affirms that “Wilde’s works offer a site where the imagination – a romantic, indeed utopian imagination – meets the marketplace that inevitably absorbs and transforms it” (Gagnier, 1986, p.15). The relationship between Wilde and the Victorian marketplace is, indeed, absolutely dialogic and is defined by the notions of performance (both in everyday life and on the theatrical stage) and self-fashioning.Wide’s complex relationship with consumer culture and his very condition of man of letters acting within the Victorian marketplace perfectly translates the idea of a Wildean philosophy as an eulogy of liminality, as an aesthetics of the threshold, which questions any form of exclusivism and identitarian obsession.
Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Marketplace
Martino Pierpaolo
2022-01-01
Abstract
In her seminal study Idylls of the Marketplace. Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public Regenia Gagnier affirms that “Wilde’s works offer a site where the imagination – a romantic, indeed utopian imagination – meets the marketplace that inevitably absorbs and transforms it” (Gagnier, 1986, p.15). The relationship between Wilde and the Victorian marketplace is, indeed, absolutely dialogic and is defined by the notions of performance (both in everyday life and on the theatrical stage) and self-fashioning.Wide’s complex relationship with consumer culture and his very condition of man of letters acting within the Victorian marketplace perfectly translates the idea of a Wildean philosophy as an eulogy of liminality, as an aesthetics of the threshold, which questions any form of exclusivism and identitarian obsession.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.