Oscar Wilde
Melvyn Bragg examines Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes. In February 1895 Oscar Wilde was at the height of his powers, he was known on both sides of the Atlantic, he was feted in London society and celebrated in the West End where An Ideal Husband continued to play to packed houses as The Importance of Being Earnest opened to ecstatic reviews. “The man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world” he is reputed to have said, and he seemed on course to do just that. But in April that year he was arrested for the crime of ‘gross indecency’ and his swift decent from omnipotence began; it ended five years later, when exiled and humiliated he died, famously ‘beyond his means’, in a Paris hotel.Wilde’s reputation spent a long time in the wilderness but just over a century after his death his stock is higher than ever before. Now that his rehabilitation seems complete how should we understand his legacy? Was Wilde a reactionary - the last of the romantics - or was he the midwife to modernism? Was there a coherent philosophy behind those beguiling epigrams or was there little more to aestheticism than dressing up and showing off? With Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, Regenia Gagnier, Professor of English at the University of Exeter and Neil Sammells, Dean of Humanities at Bath Spa University and author of Wilde Style.
Guests
- Valentine Cunningham
3 episodes
Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University -
Regenia Gagnier No other episodes
Professor of English at the University of Exeter - Neil Sammells
2 episodes
Dean of Humanities at Bath Spa University and author of Wilde Style
Related episodes
-
The Decadent Movement
18 Nov, 2021 820 English and Old English literatures -
William Hazlitt
8 Apr, 2010 820 English and Old English literatures -
Auden
19 Dec, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures -
William Morris
5 Jul, 2018 700 Arts -
Yeats and Mysticism
31 Jan, 2002 820 English and Old English literatures -
Shakespeare’s Work
11 May, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures -
Wittgenstein
4 Dec, 2003 190 Modern Western Philosophy -
Yeats and Irish Politics
17 Apr, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures -
The Later Romantics
15 Apr, 2004 820 English and Old English literatures -
Wilfred Owen
27 Oct, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures -
Modern Culture
21 Jan, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism -
Wagner
20 Jun, 2002 780 Music -
Germaine de Stael
16 Nov, 2017 840 French and related literatures -
Edith Wharton
4 Oct, 2018 810 American literature in English -
Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment
10 Feb, 2000 830 German and related literatures -
Bohemianism
9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts -
Good and Evil
1 Apr, 1999 200 Religion -
Literary Modernism
26 Apr, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures -
John Ruskin
31 Mar, 2005 700 Arts -
Thomas Hardy’s Poetry
13 Jan, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
Programme ID: p00547m3
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547m3
Auto-category: 828.809 (English Satire and Humor)