Haythem Bastawy, Review of Caroline Sumpter’s “‘No Artist has Ethical Sympathies’: Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution.”

摘要

Challenging mainstream views on Oscar Wilde’s understanding of evolutionarytheories in relation to morality, aesthetics and socialism, Caroline Sumpter argues thatWilde’s fiction and literary and social criticism need to be read in conjunction withdebates around the evolution of morality; debates that were conducted in the sameperiodicals that Wilde published his essays. The Nineteenth Century, for example, inwhich Wilde published “The Decay of Lying” (1889) and “The True Function andValue of Criticism” (1890), featured important essays on evolution and ethics by T. H.Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Sumpter argues that reading Wilde’s writings within thecontext of these topical concerns revises our understanding of Wilde as antimaterialisticand as concurring with Spencer’s ideas on evolution and society. It alsoallows, she suggests, for a more nuanced reading of Wilde’s position on evolution,aesthetics and morality that sees Wilde’s thinking not as static and well-established bythe 1870s, but fluid and changeable in its response to contemporary journalistic debates,an argument Sumpter unfolds via three stages.