April 2017
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Nineteenth Century Prose
The framing of scientific understanding and its relation to aesthetics has been the subject of renewed scrutiny in Oscar Wilde scholarship since the publication of his Oxford Notebooks in the late 1980s. From that moment on, the traditional understanding of Wilde's aesthetic vision as an uninformed reaction to science and positivism of the age became untenable. While this reassessment of science in Wilde's work has rectified previous misconceptions, it has also brought new theoretical and interpretative limitations, stemming either from an overreliance on Wilde's notion of "harmony" as "master idea" or from narrow depictions of Wilde's aesthetic project that characterize it as "informed" by science. These approaches have insufficiently appreciated the subversive character of Wilde's work - his vision of a scientific epistemology driven by the imagination toward a pursuit of knowledge and pleasure instead of simply accounting for reality. This essay argues that Wilde's narrative in The Picture of Dorian Gray is not merely informed by science but attempts the aestheticization of the scientific method. Wilde empowers the artist/scientist by allowing the contamination of the object of study, hence disrupting the boundaries of observation.