Clash of Past and Present: Production of Historical and Representational Spaces in Oscar Wilde’s Poetry

Abstract

This study aims to determine the function of space and how it is depicted in Oscar Wilde's (1854-1900) selected poems. Wilde is one of the important literary and cultural figures of the Victorian era. He criticized the traditional moral codes and values of the Victorian era in which he was born and rejected many Victorian poetic aspects. Wilde used characters and places of ancient Greek mythology in his poems and developed a poetic sensitivity that focused on the real places and characters of the city. The brothel, the prison and the streets of London are some of the places that he used in his poems. Within this framework, it can be said that Wilde is one of the leading poets who shaped the fin de siècle poetry. In this study, French thinker Henri Lefebvre’s (1901-1991) theory of space is applied to discuss the function of space in Wilde’s poetry. Lefebvre's book The Production of Space, published in 1974, was influential in the second half of the twentieth century as it examined the historical development of the concept of space and evaluated it politically. The analysis of the poems from Lefebvre’s perspective will reveal Wilde's use of space in relation to the conflict between past and present, and the attitude of the individual who wants to escape from society.