History of British L ...

📚 Collaborative Wiki Task

Build a collaborative academic overview of Aestheticism and Decadence, focusing on Oscar Wilde's exploration of beauty, art, morality, identity, and Victorian social conventions.

🔎 Areas to Develop

1. Aestheticism: Define the movement and explain its emphasis on beauty, artistic autonomy, style, and sensory experience.

2. Art for Art's Sake: Explain the principle of l'art pour l'art and discuss how it challenges the Victorian belief that literature should serve moral, educational, or utilitarian purposes.

3. Decadence: Identify the major characteristics of Decadence and explain its relationship with excess, artificiality, beauty, pleasure, and opposition to conventional morality.

4. Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray: Examine the tension between beauty and morality, appearance and reality, pleasure and responsibility in the novel.

5. The Importance of Being Earnest: Explore how Wilde uses wit, irony, paradox, and satire to criticize Victorian social values and conventions.

6. Beauty and Morality: Discuss whether Wilde's works support the independence of art from morality or reveal the dangers and limitations of pure aestheticism.

7. Wilde's Social Critique: Explain how Wilde uses aesthetic ideas, humour, performance, and irony to expose hypocrisy within Victorian society.

💡 Guiding Question

How does Oscar Wilde use beauty, irony, and aestheticism both to challenge and to expose the contradictions of Victorian morality and society?

👥 Participation Instructions

Each student should contribute meaningful information to at least one section of the wiki. Contributions should be concise, academically relevant, and connected to the lecture content. Students may add definitions, explanations, literary examples, or analyses from The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. They should also review and improve existing contributions when appropriate.

🎯 Expected Outcome

By completing this collaborative wiki, students will develop a shared academic resource explaining the principles of Aestheticism and Decadence and evaluating how Oscar Wilde uses literary form, irony, and aesthetic ideas to question Victorian morality and social conventions.