| Cloth ISBN 0-8139-1728-X • $55.00
CALLING OSCAR WILDE'S philosophy of art his "most elusive legacy," Brown
attempts to define Wilde's conception of what art is and what it 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 everyday ethics. 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 focusing on his sense of the equivocal and diminishing
presence of art in the postindustrial world.
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"Julia Prewitt Brown's study of Wilde's philosophy of art is
much the best analysis yet performed of Wilde's crucial
place in the tradition that goes from Schiller and
Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Ruskin, on to Pater, Wilde, and
Walter Benjamin. Brown usefully distances Wilde from Pater's
aesthetic empiricism and returns him to Kant's critical
idealism." --Harold Bloom, Yale University
At a time when apostles from all points along an
ideological spectrum have denigrated art, criticism, and
aesthetics, Julia Prewitt Brown has given us an elegant,
persuasive, revisionary account of Oscar Wilde, a figure
asnecessary to our own fin de siecle as to his own. . . .
Placing him within the intellectual context of the German
Romantics, the French Symbolistes, and his own Victorian
contemporaries, Professor Brown proves herself a worthy
practitioner of what Wilde labeled 'cosmopolitan
criticism.'" --Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist
University
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