A Comparative Study On The Aesthetic Features In The Picture Of Dorian Gray And The Red Peony

Aestheticism focuses on beauty and pleasure, rejects moral rules and conventionsand claims that art has no utility.“Art for art’s sake” is the core idea. Wilde was adominant figure in the aesthetic movement. This trend of thought soon came to Chinaand also brought influence to Chinese literary world, including Lin Yutang.Oscar Wilde was a leading writer in Aesthetic Movement in19thcentury. Hisonly novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a representative work of aestheticism. LinYutang was a Chinese writer who wrote many works in English and also well knownboth in China and western countries. Although he is often regarded as a romanticist,The Red Peony can be considered as an aesthetic work given all the aesthetic featuresthroughout the book.Based on the comparative study on the The Picture of Dorian Gray and The RedPeony, this thesis aims to find out the similarities and dissimilarities of aestheticfeatures through analyzing the characters and their life style, and further compare thetheoretical, cultural and history factors to realize the reason that caused thesimilarities and differences. Through analysis in various views, this thesis concludesthat the different understanding of aestheticism and western and Chinese culturaldifferences are the main source of the different aesthetic features which are reflectedin the two novels.