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This paper discusses the ways in which Wilde's poetry and aestheticism paradoxically celebrated their shared or parallel "marginal" status in the context of Victorian culture. Compared with his plays, fiction and critical essays, Wilde's poetry has been given insufficient critical attention, and it is worth exploring why Wilde the poet so consistently produced pastorals throughout his literary career. As a subgenre of poetry, the pastoral is significantly permeated with a sense of loss and belatedness because such an ideal and care-free world of shepherds and shepherdesses as depicted in the pastoral is a deliberately artificial and conventional--read "generic" here--construct. The pastoral represents, among other things, a delightful defiance of the very pressure of reality, and this generic or internal "logic" can be also witnessed in Wilde's famous aesthetic credo that "Life imitates Art," a reversal of the time-honored mimetic view that art functions as "a mirror held up to nature." According to Wilde's wry perspective, the public's lack of interest in poetry resulted in an ironic protection of it from the relentless materialism of the Victorian age. In a similar vein, aestheticism was past its prime when Wilde self-consciously appointed himself its chief representative. Regardless of his international fame after his lecture tour to the US (1882-1883), he was fully aware of his own culturally “marginal” position as an aesthete and nevertheless waged his aesthetic campaign cheerfully and valiantly.

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저자

• 봉준수 [ Joon-Soo BONG | 서울대학교 ]

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