Abstract

That Oscar Wilde was a central figure for aestheticism needs no arguing; that he should be taken seriously as an aesthetician is perhaps a less obvious matter. While much of his work concerns itself with the traditional purview of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, commentators have rarely granted his writings that attention to ideas qua ideas that marks off a philosophical interest in a writer's oeuvre from other types of analysis. A number of attempts to tackle Wilde's pronouncements in a broadly philosophical fashion have been made through the decades.1 Most recent scholarship, however, has regarded Wilde...