Gender issues, sexuality and Aestheticism with Oscar Wilde

Abstract

The present paper attempts to highlight Oscar Wilde’s important contribution to the Aesthetic movement through a series of commitments regarding the contextualization and dissemination of the author’s wit. Gender and sexuality will be discussed within a modern approach to Oscar Wilde’s reception in Europe and in the United States, pursuing a deconstructive paradigm. Monocular perspectives and analyses of a certain cultural identity in a single spatial and temporal perimeter are replaced with the systematic defragmentation of the social and historical levels, thus highlighting the importance of variability and relativity in examining literary phenomena.