Ripe was the drowsy hour: The age of Oscar Wilde A Continuum book_图书大全
Ripe was the drowsy hour: The age of Oscar Wilde A Continuum book
ISBN: 9780816493081
定价: 0.00
内容简介
In I895, as Oscar Wilde sat in Holloway
Prison awaiting trial on charges of sodomy,
Punch ingenuously wondered whether Art has
"a mission that may not be named, with "scarlet
sinS to enervate the age."
The age dealt with that mission by naming it
aestheticism, impressionism, decadence, symbol-
ism, and various other labels none entirely satis-
factory, all displaying certain characteristics of
the nervous sensibilities of those who sought in
art, as Walter Pater suggested, a sort of cloistered
refuge from a certain vulgarity in the outside
world. J- E. Chamberlin s brilliant study is about
that mission--as it was perceived both by its
missionaries and by those uncomfortable with
its implications.
In Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour, Chamberlin
focuses on Wilde, and on the personalities and
events that defined his world. His study moves
outward to include the culture and society of the
rime, and inward to suggest some of the motiva-
tions behind individual beliefs and commitments.
The world of Oscar Wilde, which included
such luminaries as Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beer-
bohm, Sarah Bernhardt, D Oyly Carte, John
Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, James Whistler,
and W. B. Yeats, was an inseparable part of the
intellectual dilemmas, social confusions, and
aesthetic turmoils of the age. The fascination
with the perverse and the paradoxical, with
images of sinister charm and metaphors of
splendid artificiality, with the complex interrela-
tionships between sorrow and joy, pleasure and
pain, and beauty and truth, are Chamberlin s
subjects in this engrossing and important work.
