Author: Oscar Wilde Publisher: DigiCat ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 40
Book Description
The Truth of Masks is an essay written by Oscar Wilde, first publisched in 1886. This work speaks about the power and necessity of illusion in Shakespeare's plays and the importance of the costumes. He goes on and on about it, and then ends the essay with the following statement: "Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art- criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel's system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks." Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish poet and dramatist, famous for The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray. His controversial, open lifestyle was the reason he was charged and eventually convicted for the crime of sodomy.
Author: Shaul Ezer Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN: 9781727343816 Category : Languages : en Pages : 58
Book Description
The tragedy of Oscar Wilde is a greater story than anything he wrote. This play is about his life, with glimpses of some of his work. Wilde still speaks to us - with his wit and insight, for many of the things he said still enchant us and still ring true more than a century after his death.
Author: Giles Whiteley Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351555464 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
Oscar Wilde is more than a name, more than an author. From precocious Oxford undergraduate to cause celebre of the West End of the 1890s, to infamous criminal, the proper name Wilde has become an event in the history of literature and culture. Taking Wilde seriously as a philosopher in his own right, Whiteley's groundbreaking book places his texts into their philosophical context in order to show how Wilde broke from his peers, and in particular from idealism, and challenges recent neo-historicist readings of Wilde which seem content to limit his irruptive power. Using the paradoxical concept of the simulacrum to resituate Wilde's work in relation to both his precursors and his contemporaries, Whiteley's study reads Wilde through Deleuze and postmodern philosophical commentary on the simulacrum. In a series of striking juxtapositions, Whiteley challenges us to rethink both Oscar Wilde's aesthetics and his philosophy, to take seriously both the man and the mask. His philosophy of masks is revealed to figure a truth of a different kind - the simulacra through which Wilde begins to develop and formulate a mature philosophy that constitutes an ethics of joy.
Author: Bruna Cardoso Gravem Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing ISBN: 9783659262203 Category : Languages : en Pages : 124
Book Description
In the oppressing Victorian society Oscar Wilde was a breath of fresh air. His eccentric and at times polemic lifestyle transformed his life into a roller coaster with many highs and lows. This book examines how three strings tangle together in Wilde's art: the person, the author and his literary works. It also studies the concepts of mask and shadow by Jung to analyze how both Wilde and his characters used these concepts to play their roles in society. Finally, it tries to better understand how these three strings influenced one another throughout Wilde's life, leading to both extreme success as well as his exile and ruin.
Author: Neil Bartlett Publisher: Profile Books(GB) ISBN: 9781852421236 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
Sitting up reading late at night, the author reflects on the links between the homosexual of the 1980s and his counterparts of a century ago, between gay lives today and those of Oscar Wilde, his friends, lovers and acquaintances. Many books have been written about Oscar Wilde. Who Was That Man? is unique - the acting out of a love-hate relationship between Wilde and a gay Londoner of today. Neil Bartlett has grabbed history by the collar and made bitter love to it. I can think of no other way to describe this fantastic personal meditation on Oscar Wilde and the last hundred years of English homosexuality. At the very moment gay existence is endangered by disease and a renewed puritanism, Bartlett has embraced what was alien and criminal or merely clinical and loved it into poignant life - Edmund White
Author: Oscar Wilde Publisher: CreateSpace ISBN: 9781480198128 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 28
Book Description
In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes of his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry's production of Antony and Cleopatra, he would probably say that the play, and the play only, is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella. While, as regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article in the Nineteenth Century, has laid it down as a dogma of art that archaeology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of Shakespeare's plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of the stupidest pedantries of an age of prigs.
Author: Joseph Pearce Publisher: Ignatius Press ISBN: 1681495643 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
Vilified by fellow Victorians for his sexuality and his dandyism, Oscar Wilde, the great poet, satirist and playwright, is hailed today, in some circles, as a progressive sexual liberator. But this image is not how Wilde saw himself. Joseph Pearce's biography strips away pretensions to show the real man, his aspirations and desires. It uncovers how he was broken by his prison sentence; it probes the deeper thinking behind masterpieces such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis; and it traces his fascination with Catholicism through to his eleventh-hour conversion. Pearce removes the masks and reveals the Wilde beneath the surface. He has written a profound, wide-ranging study with many original insights on a great literary figure.
Author: Olga Taxidou Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134424574 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
No study of modern theater is complete without a thorough understanding of the enormous influence of visionary genius Edward Gordon Craig. Born in England in 1872, Craig went on to become famous world-wide as an actor, manager, director, playwright, designer, and most importantly an author and theorist, whose books were translated into German, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, and Danish. Although an essential parallel to the European avant-garde, Craig was often read as "exceptional" and highly innovative in his native Britain, thus, The Mask not only appears as Craig's main cosmopolitan project but also at times functions as a surrogate stage for his experiments in theater practice. The book has a comprehensive chronology, extensive notes and a bibliography making it an essential text for undergraduates, postgraduates, actors, theatre professionals, designers, directors, researchers and writers in the fields of theatre studies (especially theater set and lighting) and theater history.