The history of Oscar Wilde

It calls into question materialist modes of individual progress such as found in the work of Herbert Spencer, instead drawing on German Romantic concepts of individual development to better understand and narrate human progress. Chapter Four solidifies the centrality of Victorian historical-philosophical debates to Wilde’s aesthetic practices by reading his play Salome as a contemplation on the complexity of acquiring complete historical affirmation.

In particular, how rationalist approaches to biblical historiography during the Victorian period raised questions about the critical ability to uncover the truth of the religious past. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates Wilde’s arrival at a philosophy of history that destabilises definitions of the past as a fixed state and reconfigures it as a mode of multifaceted and perpetual experience. This project therefore revaluates Wilde’s interest in history as a primarily hermeneutical endeavour concerned with both the epistemological problems and possibilities of conceptualising the past.