Oscar Wilde's decorated books

This dissertation grapples with the problems posed to reading and to criticism by the so-called aestheticism of Wilde's writings. It contends that historicist scholarship needs to square up to Wilde's "aesthetic" polemic if it is to unlock Wilde studies from the confines of what Ian Small has recently called "the Wilde myth."; In part, this means that the dissertation addresses what Wilde called the "decorative" functions of language as well as its "expressive" ones. It argues that criticism's preoccupation with Wilde's language as an expressive medium alone (what Wilde would call criticism's earnestness) has obscured both Wilde's commitments to language's decorative functions as well as the central role played by book decoration--by book designers like Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Shannon, and especially Charles Ricketts--in the production of Wilde's works. It holds that the production of Wilde's works in their own day as decorated books bears squarely on our understanding of those works; and that even in the case of the plays, Wilde's obsession with the decoration of his work bears crucially on larger questions of literary and historical meaning.; On an important level, therefore, the dissertation is an attempt to do justice to that valorization of the decorative over the expressive to be found throughout Wilde's writings. But on another level, the dissertation is an argument about historical textual practice. Essentially, it contends that questions of literary meaning and value cannot be decided by reference to a work's author exclusively; nor is literary meaning something that can be said to reside "deep" within a given text. Wilde's writings, it argues, are valuable because they work emphatically to dissociate their meanings from the intentions of their author--indeed, they question whether such intentions are ever capable of positive identification. Through their insistence on their own status as "produced" objects, Wilde's works call attention to themselves as both concrete artifacts and acts of performance. As decorated books, they emphasize language as a material, social phenomenon; consequently they demand to be read according to dialectical principles--principles the dominant institutions of criticism adamantly oppose.