My twofold aim with this essay is, firstly, to examine the ideas about art expressed in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by the Victorian author Oscar Wilde. Secondly, I analyse how Oscar Wilde has implemented the philosophy of aestheticism throughout his novel. I achieve this by discussing the novel from the perspectives of the arts of painting, acting and literature. I examine the ideas expressed through the three main characters Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton. I give occurrences of alliteration, epigrams and theatrical traits of the novel as examples of how the novel in itself is a beautiful work of art. With this essay I wish to highlight the need for all types of art mentioned in The Picture of Dorian Gray to be included in any discussion about art in the novel. My thesis statement is that the philosophy of aestheticism is promoted throughout the novel. This philosophy states that art should only be seen as something beautiful. Art should not be expected to teach its audience any moral lessons. The over-all conclusion is that it is indeed the philosophy of aestheticism that is promoted in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the ideal of male beauty in particular.

Le symbolisme, d’abord inféodé à la conception idéaliste de la vérité et du beau, expose en réalité, dans sapratique et dans ses oeuvres une position ambiguë. Le symbole compris comme le médium par lequel sedévoilerait une vérité idéale semble en fait valoir en et pour lui-même, indépendamment de tout principesupérieur. L’image de la femme, est, chez les symbolistes, le point nodal du basculement de la théorie de lavérité. De la Femme dans l’Art ! dit Charles Maurice, Elle en est l’objet et le but… L’image de la femme, loinde conforter la conception idéale de la vérité, manifeste au contraire une certaine forme de subversion. Lessymbolistes vénèrent la femme. Non pas parce qu’elle est « le signe du vrai », selon la formule de Plotin, maisparce qu’elle est le symbole même de la superficialité de la représentation. Chez les symbolistes, c’est donc parla représentation de la femme (fuyante, fardée, fatale…) que s’accomplit le renversement de l’idée même devérité. A cet égard, le symbolisme est donc bien davantage un anti-platonisme qu’un idéalisme. La vérité,débarrassée de son substrat s’affirme pour elle-même, dans sa complète autonomie. Ce renversement de lanotion de vérité ne peut s’effectuer, cependant, sans une remise en question radicale du sujet et sans unquestionnement fondamental sur le rôle de l’artiste dans le dévoilement de la vérité. C’est la raison pourlaquelle le symbolisme, au tournant du XIXème et du XXème siècle se tournera vers de nouvelles expériences(affirmation du moi, surréalisme, abstraction…) dont l’objectif sera d’éprouver les limites du moi et derenouveler ainsi le perpétuellement questionnement de l’art sur le réel. / Symbolism, first subservient to the idealistic conception of Truth and Beauty, actually exposes in its practiceand in its works an ambiguous position. The symbol seen as the medium unveiling an ideal truth appears to beindeed an autonomous object, giving up reference to any higher principle. The image of woman is among thesymbolists, the node of the failover of the theory of Truth. Women in Art! Charles Maurice said, she is theobject and the purpose of art... The image of woman, far from strengthening the ideal conception of Truth,rather shows some form of subversion. The symbolists worship women. Not because her beauty is "the sign ofTruth," to quote Plotinus, but because woman is the very symbol of the superficiality of representation. Withthe symbolists, the representation of women (evasive, fake, fatal...) accomplishes the reversal of the idea ofTruth. In this regard, the symbolism is much more an anti-Platonism than an avatar of idealism. Truth, strippedof its substrate, asserts itself in its full autonomy. This reversal of the notion of Truth can’t be done, however,without a radical rethinking of the notion of subjectivity and without a fundamental questioning on the role ofthe artist in the pursuit of Truth. That is why Symbolism, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century,will experience new artistic ways (self-assertion, surrealism, abstraction...) with an objective to test the limitsof self and to renew the perpetual questioning of art on reality.

This is a study of what I argue is a neglected side of Aestheticism. A standard definition of Aestheticism is that its practitioners turn away from the general current of modernity to protest its utilitarian and materialistic values, but this generalization ignores the profound influence of contemporary philosophical and scientific thought on such major figures of British Aestheticism as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. This study focuses on Aesthetes who are not in flight from modernity. I call their type of Aestheticism "Epicurean Aestheticism" and argue that since this temperament is characterized by a willingness to engage with the flux of modern times it must be distinguished from the more familiar, escapist form of Aestheticism I call "Platonic Aestheticism." I propose that Aestheticism be viewed as a spectrum with Epicurean Aestheticism on one side and the Platonic variety on the other. While Platonic Aesthetes like W. B . Yeats and Stephane Mallarme continue the Romantic project of trying to counter modernity with various idealist and absolutist philosophies, Epicurean Aesthetes adopt materialist and relativistic strategies in their desire to make the most of modern life. I argue that the first unmistakable signs of Epicurean Aestheticism are to be found in Thomas De Quincey, that the sensibility is fully formulated be Pater, continued by Wilde, and finds a current representative in Tom Stoppard. All Aesthetes are dedicated to the pursuit of beauty, but Platonic Aesthetes seek beauty in an eternal and transcendent realm, while Epicurean Aesthetes have given up such absolutist habits of thought. Pater writes: "Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the "relative" spirit in place of the "absolute." Epicurean Aesthetes want a new aesthetic that will parallel the paradigm shift from absolutism to relativism. While a nostalgic, quasi-religious longing for a purely ideal realm characterizes Platonic Aesthetes, Epicurean Aesthetes accept that the high, idealistic road to eternal beauty is closed. Instead of lamenting this fact, they start looking for beauty among the uncertainties of the phenomenal world: by viewing life as an aesthetic spectacle to be observed and experimented on with playful detachment they become Epicureans of the flux of modernity. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Dans En route, (1895) de J.-K. Huysmans, Durtal, le protagoniste, est à la recherche de ce que l’on pourrait appeler son idéal esthétique. Cette recherche, qui est l’une des étapes de sa conversion, le mène d’église en église, à travers Paris et jusqu’à l’abbaye Notre-Dame de l’Âtre, en quête d’art religieux, du plain-chant le plus authentique, des messes les plus touchantes, des plus belles figures de piété. Or, on observe que cette recherche obsessionnelle d’un idéal esthétique est l’un des leitmotivs de la littérature décadentiste. Comment expliquer qu’elle ait une importance aussi grande dans En route, sachant que la conversion, ainsi que le laisse entendre la fin célèbre d’À rebours, signale la fin des obsessions du décadentisme ? Ce mémoire s’attarde à cerner les objets auxquels s’attache Durtal, à examiner leur rapport avec ceux auxquels s’attache le décadentisme et à déterminer si la conversion, dans En route, peut être considérée comme une extension de la crise du sujet décadentiste. Il interroge la figure du personnage huysmansien, les notions de poétique propres au décadentisme huysmansien et ce que Freud identifie dans l’essai Un souvenir d’enfance de Léonard de Vinci (1910) comme une tendance de l’homme célibataire à sublimer ses pulsions sexuelles en une forme d’idéalisation et d’enthousiasme pour l’art, en une soif difficilement contentée d’art, de beauté et de connaissance. L’enjeu de ce travail est de démontrer que la quête de l’idéal esthétique, dans En route, se situe entre l’obsession décadentiste et la sublimation du désir. / In J.-K Huysmans 1895 novel En route, Durtal, the protagonist, is in search of what one might call an aesthetic ideal. This quest, which is one of the stages of his conversion, takes him from church to church, through Paris and ultimately to the Abbey of Notre-Dame de l’Âtre, in search of religious art, of the most authentic Gregorian chant, the most touching masses, the most beautiful figures of piety. This obsessive search for the aesthetic ideal is one of the leitmotifs of decadent literature. However, how can we explain that it has such great importance in En Route, given that religious conversion, as the famous ending of À rebours suggests, should be the end of the decadent movement’s obsessions? This research focuses on identifying the art to which Durtal is attracted, and will examine their relationship with decadent art to determine whether conversion, in En Route, can be considered as an extension of the crisis of the decadent subject. It also studies the figure of the Huysmansian character, the notions of poetics specific to Huysmansian decadentism and what Freud identifies in the essay Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) as a tendency of the celibate man to sublimate his sexual drives into a form of idealization and enthusiasm for art, a hard-satisfied thirst for art, beauty and knowledge. The goal of this research is to demonstrate that the quest for the aesthetic ideal, in En Route, lies between the old decadent’s obsessions and the sublimation of sexual desire.

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This dissertation addresses how the philosophy, subculture, and sexuality of aestheticism interact with the form of the nineteenth-century novel. One primary result of this exploration is a nuanced delineation of the aesthetic novel in its formal characteristics, its content, and most notably, in the sexually charged silences that both this form and content reveal--silences made audible to invested aesthetic readers through coded doubleness. Through thus defining the aesthetic novel and seeking to articulate the unspoken sexual transgressions that are, as is argued, requisite therein, this project sheds new light both on the partially submerged sexuality of aestheticism as a movement, and on why novels account for so small a portion of the aesthetic movement's output--topics first raised in part by Linda Dowling, Dennis Denisoff, and Talia Schaffer. By engaging Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Vernon Lee's Miss Brown (1884), Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885), Robert Hichens' The Green Carnation (1894), John Meade Falkner's The Lost Stradivarius (1895), and Aubrey Beardsley's Venus and Tannhäuser (1895), this dissertation demonstrates that, whether politically engaged as affirmation or using sexuality as a way to communicate rejection of middle-class morality and its own fascination with the unusual, aestheticism defines itself by its inclusion of unusual sexual situations. This argument is in part guided by and grapples with theoretical writings by Victorian sources including Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Hamilton and contemporary sources including Alistair Fowler, Nancy Armstrong, and D. A. Miller. Central to the dissertation are the suggestive silences in aesthetic novels that function not merely as the unsaid, but appear at points that beg explanation or exploration, indicating the presence of the forbidden with the frisson between interest and absence. Such moments form a pattern of mysterious sexual omissions in the novels of aestheticism, titillating audiences with their implied perversity, but never explicitly exploring it on account of legal, economic, and social censorship. Finally, this project shows that the unspeakable gaps in legal above-ground literature can easily be articulated within the already illegal world of pornography, which this dissertation accesses through the aesthetic and pornographic Teleny (1893). / English

An act of violence, be it personal or institution is an event that would distress most witnesses. Yet the representation of violent acts in fictional forms as literature, drama and film often aestheticises that violence, with the result that it is possible to experience it without such distress. However, despite various conjectures being offered, no single and universal theory is possible. An aesthetic response to a representation of violence is influenced to a large extent by the degree of aestheticisation produced by the author and/or director. In addition, the aestheticisation of violence is dependent upon, and an inevitable consequence of, the representation of the violent. This dissertation is an endeavour to explore the issues that the paradox makes evident, to critique various hypotheses that have been offered as a solution, and to speculate upon a more comprehensive theory ofthe representation and aestheticisation of violence / English Studies / M.A. (English)

The aim of the following study was to illustrate that the death of the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s novel, Death in Venice, was, in the end, not just a corporeal, but rather a spiritual one, and ultimately the result of his failure to explore the potential and true depth of human feeling. The definition of the term decadence as a state "against nature: the revulsion against both physical and human nature, preference for the artificial" (Ritter 1992, 87) served as the main theoretical basis of the study and proved helpful in articulating the protagonist’s tragic flaw, namely, his preference for the shallow image of mere physical beauty. Furthermore, the perceptive views of critics Hermann Luft and Rolf Günter Renner on the novel’s underlying conflict between the spiritual and physical conception of beauty helped to substantiate the study’s own stance on the negative implications of the type of aesthetic formalism that leads to the protagonist’s ultimate demise. Focusing on these aspects helped to provide an analysis of the novel that is not only restricted to a socio-political-historical context, but which sees the novel in general as the embodiment of an essential universal and timeless message and ideal, namely, that one must strive to penetrate the realm of physical, sensual phenomena in this world in order to reach the content, i.e. the spiritual, eternal attributes which lie behind it.

The ephemeral life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood belies the importance of an organization that grows from and transcends its originally limited aesthetic principles and circumscribed credo. The founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 really marks the beginning of a movement that metamorphizes into Aestheticism/Decadence. It is the purpose of this dissertation to demonstrate that, from its inception, Pre-Raphaelitism is the first English manifestation of Aestheticism/Decadence. Although the connection between Pre- Raphaelitism and the Aesthete/Decadent movement is proposed or mentioned by several writers, none has written a coherent justification for the viewing of Pre-Raphaelitism as the starting point for English Decadence This dissertation attempts to establish the primacy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the development of Aestheticism/Decadence.

An act of violence, be it personal or institution is an event that would distress most witnesses. Yet the representation of violent acts in fictional forms as literature, drama and film often aestheticises that violence, with the result that it is possible to experience it without such distress. However, despite various conjectures being offered, no single and universal theory is possible. An aesthetic response to a representation of violence is influenced to a large extent by the degree of aestheticisation produced by the author and/or director. In addition, the aestheticisation of violence is dependent upon, and an inevitable consequence of, the representation of the violent. This dissertation is an endeavour to explore the issues that the paradox makes evident, to critique various hypotheses that have been offered as a solution, and to speculate upon a more comprehensive theory ofthe representation and aestheticisation of violence / English Studies / M.A. (English)