In the first book to explore the philosophical significance of Oscar Wilde’s life and work, Julia Prewitt Brown establishes Wilde’s importance to 19th-century literature and thought by placing him in the continuum of continental aesthetic philosophy from Kant and Schiller, through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, to Benjamin and Adorno. Calling his philosophy of art his
most elusive legacy , Brown attempts to define Wilde’s conceptions of what art is and is not, of what the experience of art means in the modern world, and of the contradictory relations between the work of art and the sphere of the ethical everyday. She traces the experimental character of Wilde’s thought from its resonance in his own life through its development within the tradition of aesthetic philosophy, ultimately focussing on his sense of the equivocal and diminishing presence of art in the postindustrial world. Convinced that the future of art, as well as that of civilization as a whole, depended upon the development of what he called
cosmopolitan criticism , Wilde consciously made himself at home in the culture of other nations. This did not entail a repudiation of his own roots, however, and was thus dialectical in nature. Brown firmly places Wilde amidst the thinkers who gave rise to his philosophy - Ruskin, Pater, Arnold, Baudelaire - and she establishes his role as the link between Victorian ideas and the more modern Benjamin and Adorno.
Cosmopolitan Criticism
is an interdisciplinary study that should appeal not only to Wilde enthusiasts but also to readers interested in 19th- and 20th-century literature and aesthetics. In this time of debate over ethics and the arts, Brown’s provocative analysis will add much to the dialogue.