Oscar Wilde and Authorialism

Authors

  • Andrea Selleri University of Warwick

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v3i2.1086

Keywords:

Oscar Wilde, authorialism, authorial intention, 19th-century literary criticism, reception

Abstract

This essay introduces the concept of “authorialism” to characterise the critical orientation that sees literary works primarily as actions on the part of their authors rather than as linguistic objects, using the early reception of Oscar Wilde’s works as a case study. It is argued that authorialism was the dominant tendency in 1875-1900 Anglophone criticism, and that it has characterised assessments of Wilde’s works to this day. The method has the advantage of finding coherence in literary works, which is useful in assessing matters of value; the textual features of Wilde’s writings, however, resist authorialist readings by not featuring the expected coherence.

Author Biography

Andrea Selleri, University of Warwick

Andrea Selleri is an associate fellow at the University of Warwick, where he recently obtained his PhD with a thesis on “The Author as a Critical Category, 1850-1900”. His main areas of research are nineteenth-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and literary criticism, and contemporary philosophical aesthetics. He has published articles on Wilde, the interaction of literary studies and the philosophy of literature, and the concept of authenticity. His next research project will concern the pre-history of Formalism.

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Published

2014-11-28

How to Cite

Selleri, A. (2014). Oscar Wilde and Authorialism. uthorship, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v3i2.1086

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2014)

Section

Articles

License

Authorship allows authors to hold both the copyright and the publishing rights over their work without restrictions. However, a mention of their first publication in Authorship will be highly appreciated.