Dorian gray context Flashcards
- When was Dorian Gray published in the UK?
1891
- In which magazine was it released in the previous year
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
- What was this time period known as?
Victorian fin de siècle
Jekyll and hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson; 1886
London divide
separated more by privilege than distance’.
- On which book was ‘the yellow book’ supposedly based upon? Who is the main character and what is his lifestyle like?
À rebours (French translated Against Nature or Against the Grain) (1884) is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation
- Who was Narcissus
In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter who was known for his beauty. Narcissus was proud, in that he disdained those who loved him, causing some to commit suicide to prove their unrelenting devotion to his striking beauty. Narcissus is the origin of the term narcissism, a fixation with oneself and one’s physical appearance or public perception.
- What was the aesthetic movement?
The aesthetic movement was a late nineteenth century movement that championed pure beauty and ‘art for art’s sake’ emphasising the visual and sensual qualities of art and design over practical, moral or narrative considerations.
- What was Cesare Lombroso’s theory?
Using concepts drawn from physiognomy, degeneration theory, psychiatry and Social Darwinism, Lombroso’s theory of anthropological criminology essentially stated that criminality was inherited, and that someone “born criminal” could be identified by physical (congenital) defects, which confirmed a criminal as savage or atavistic.
- According to the legend, for what did Faust sell his soul to the devil
Knowlege and wordley pleasures
- Who was Mephistopheles?
The devil’s agent
- In which year was Wilde’s courtcase?
1895
- In which year did the Criminal Law Amendment Act outlaw ‘gross indecency’ between men?
1885
- What was The Cleveland Street Scandal in 1889?
The Cleveland Street scandal occurred in 1889, when a homosexual male brothel in Cleveland Street, London , was discovered by police. The government was accused of covering up the scandal to protect the names of aristocratic and other prominent patrons. At the time, sexual acts between men were illegal in Britain, and the brothel’s clients faced possible prosecution and certain social ostracism if discovered.
- Scot’s Observer wrote
“Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but, if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring… the better”
